THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

There’s more than one variety of evergreen that will add shape and cheer to the Christmas garden, says Monty Don

My favourite Christmas trees are growing outside and will – I hope – never be brought into the house. I think I am safe on that score because you would need a crane to shift even the smallest one. There are 16 of them, all clipped to tight cone shapes and all made from yew, Taxus baccata. We have become accustomed to Christmas trees being something we buy and bring indoors as a symbol of green growth in the middle of winter, but that symbolism is just as powerful at this time of year when it is growing outside. My ranks of yews are, on bleak midwinter days, a constant source of hope and inspiration that there is life and growth and spring will indeed come before too long.

Evergreens like yew do not get such a good press as all the floral alternatives, but our gardens would be very bare without them for half the year. All the seasonal green we associate with wreaths, decoration and festivity work their magic just as well in the garden. Holly, ivy and mistletoe also adorn my plot and I would not be without any of them at any time of year.

Another example, box, Buxus sempervirens – and the dwarf variety B.s.‘ Suffruticosa’ – was for centuries the ideal hedging plant to establish year-round green garden structure, making parterres, hedges, labyrinths and complicated patterns around bedding plants. But it is now too riddled with box blight and box tree caterpillar to be a viable choice for low hedging. I do, however, still have two avenues of box cones, using the very vigorous, large-leafed box B. s. ‘Handsworthiensis’, one planted alongside a path down what we call The Long Walk and the other in large pots on our cricket pitch (where not a ball has been bowled for 20 years, but long ago, when my children were small, we did indeed play cricket there). Although this variety is not immune to blight, it recovers if given plenty of ventilation and left uncut for a year or two.

I am replacing much of my box with yew, which, as well as making magnificently statuesque shapes or high hedges, can also be kept to a reasonably constrained size and shape. Yew grows faster than box and will, by and large, grow anywhere as long as – and this is essential – it has decent drainage. On my heavy clay that means adding lots of grit beneath any yew that I plant, and also moundplanting hedges – in other words, planting them on a ridge made of earth and grit so the roots never sit in cold, wet soil.

Once planted, though, my yew hedges get little care other than a mulch of mushroom compost (they appreciate the alkalinity) every spring and a trim every August. That is it.

Clipping hedges into shapes, however – whether they are of box, yew or holly – is creative, provides structure and is, I think, an irresistible instinct. Of course it is wholly unnatural and controlled, but then so is all gardening, and it takes less time, skill and trouble than, for example, establishing a wildflower meadow. What’s more, it is fun. Too often we become solemn about gardening, but if it fails to offer pleasure and delight, then it fails completely.

Whatever shapes you make with evergreen plants, winter is the best time to appreciate them. The advantage of using yew for topiary is that if you clip it in late summer it holds its shape until well into the next spring. I only cut my yew shapes once a year, with one exception – topiary Nigel, the yew tribute to my beloved retriever who died last spring, gets a trim twice a year, in July and again in early autumn. But then, Nigel always did have an exceptionally shaggy coat.

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Monty with his dogs Patti and Nellie and his yew cones. Inset left: with Nellie and the topiary tribute to Nigel