Give Your Garden Elegant Style with These 21 Boxwood Landscaping Ideas
Bonus: They require less maintenance than you think.
Nothing freshens up the facade of a house like emerald-green shrubbery. Thanks to their versatility, boxwoods are a perennial favorite among traditionalists and modernists alike. Long associated with French gardens with clipped hedges demarcating shapely parterres, the small-leafed bush is an obvious choice for adding formality to any house facade. Yet its sculptural nature also lends itself quite nicely to minimalist settings and, when allowed to grow a bit more wildly, the evergreen shrub is right at home in more rustic gardens as well.
Beyond just their style, boxwoods serve many functions in landscaping, from framing an entry and edging a walkway border to surrounding an outdoor fountain and marking off a shady flower bed. And they require less maintenance than you might think: Although they need watering and mulching, boxwoods do not require regular tending, unless you opt for a super-sculpted look.
Whether you're craving something formal or a little more low maintenance, let these beautiful boxwood landscape ideas inspire your next weekend project. Happy planting!
Along the Wall
At Richard Smith's English countryside estate, boxwood globes provide sculptural and colorful contrast to a lively tapestry of purple wallflowers and mauve nepeta grandiflora greets visitors along the back drive.
Evergreen Passage
In Robb Nestor and Bill Reynolds' Connecticut garden, Japanese pachysandra, giant butterbur, and large English boxwood globes form an evergreen passage from the pool garden to a potting shed and greenhouse.
Beautiful Borders
Nestor and Reynolds lined a gravel path to their garden house, designed in the spirit of the vernacular outbuildings of the South, with boxwood shrubs that also serve as a border for their flower beds.
Evergreen Potager
In this Connecticut potager, cabbage—along with herbs, lettuces, and leeks—bursts forth from geometric boxwood hedges.
A Rustic Parterre
This Connecticut parterre garden is planted with dwarf boxwood, crab apple trees, and New Guinea impatiens. “It’s inspired by older European and New England gardens and not too formal,” notes landscape designer Drew Kenny.
Pretty Path Markers
In this Connecticut cottage garden, a pea-stone path bordered by boxwood, veggies, and herbs leads to a shingled potting shed. Climbing the fence is Sweet Autumn clematis.
Lush Labyrinth
In front of his Memphis cottage, designer and antiques dealer William Eubanks added more than a quarter acre of formally planted "rooms," including the labyrinth-style garden, which features American boxwood.
Manicured Minimalism
At this Montecito, California, home, landscaper Steve Gierke of Hoerr Schaudt replaced a paved passageway with this gravel entry courtyard planted sparsely with olive trees and boxwood globes that offer drought-tolerant shade and cool color.
Geometric Grandeur
Manicured boxwood hedges and cones form graphic parterres that anchor columnar red maple trees in this Chicago garden designed by landscape designer Doug Hoerr of Hoerr Schaudt.
Simple Sophistication
Framing the steps and entrance of designer Caroline Gidiere's Georgian-style home in Mountain Brook, Alabama, a series of potted and planted boxwood globes add easy (and evergreen) elegance.
Pool Privacy Hedge
Landscape designer Edmund Hollander planted a boxwood hedge between lush Annabelle hydrangeas and soaring crepe myrtles that creates an elegant green screen around the rimless pool at this Long Island, New York, home.
Fountain Foundation
In the formal garden behind this South Georgia hunting retreat, architect Gil Schafer installed linear boxwood hedges to create an evergreen layer lining marble fountain coping and aged brick paths.
Sculpted Hedge
A round pebble mosaic at this Montecito, California, home is softened by a shapely hedge of boxwood, iceberg roses, and cypress trees.
Sea of Evergreen
In front of this Connecticut farmhouse, loosely shaped boxwood globes add soft formality to the hillside garden designed by landscape architect Deborah Nevins & Associates.
Courtyard Edging
Outside this Houston home, garden designer Herbert Pickworth simplified the plantings to show off the crepe myrtles. After clearing a web of overgrown vegetation, he installed a clean hedge of clipped boxwood and a gravel courtyard and path.
Potted Perfection
Under the canopy of a soaring old tree at his Atlanta home, architect Bobby McAlpine lushed up his gravel courtyard with groupings of potted boxwoods and topiaries in varying sizes. The lounge chairs are Sutherland; the table is from McAlpine’s collection with Elegant Earth. The garden was designed by Mike Kaiser of Kaiser Trabue.
Oversize Globes
At Oprah Winfrey's Montecito, California, garden designed by Dan Bifano, tightly clipped boxwoods and myrtle topiaries add formal structure to the lush rose-cutting gardens.
Tailored Facade
A parade of boxwood globes lends lush contrast to the facade of this Atlanta home, designed by architect D. Stanley Dixon with interiors by Carolyn Malone.
Defining Color
Large boxwood globes potted in oversize terra-cotta pots and a low boxwood hedge line the pathways of the formal gardens of design icon Juan Pablo Molyneux’s retreat in the Aube region of France.
Bed Borders
At this Connecticut home, an English-style cutting garden designed by Wilber & King Nurseries features raised beds with small boxwood globes marking the corners.
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