Buxus ‘English Box’ (Bare Rooted) Equivilent to 8″ Pot Size

Why buy bare rooted English Box?

Establishing an English Box hedge, especially if you want to to do so quickly, requires planting 5-6 plants per metre. The cost can quickly add up.

We sell more bare rooted English Box every winter than any other plant, because at this time of year:

• English Box stays green in winter but becomes practically dormant, meaning its happy to be stored and transported out of a pot with its roots bare.
• This also means that English Box that has been grown in the ground in a field (rather than in a pot its whole life) can be dug up and sold directly to the public.
• These field grown plants are bigger, bushier and healthier than those that spent their life in a pot.
• The cost of the pot, soil and their weight in transport is eliminated for the grower.
• We pass these savings on to our customers.
• This results in huge discounts on big, bushy English Box plants.

Click here for more info on bare rooted plants.

Why do I want big English Box plants?

English Box (Buxus sempervirens) is the ultimate low, formal hedge plant. Part of what makes it so popular is that it does not require endless trimming all year to keep its neat shape. Once or maybe twice in a year is enough!

The downside is this. The reason English Box is so easy to maintain is that it is slow growing. So if you want to plant an English Box hedge or border, you could be waiting 2 years for it to get up to a lovely, neat and continuous box shape.

That’s IF you start with small English Box plants. But in the bare root winter season, you can get lovely big bushy large English Box plants for a fraction of the price you would pay for something that size the rest of the year. This way you can create almost an instant English Box hedge.

Growing English Box

English Box grows in full sun through to the very deepest shade. In fact English Box will grow with no direct sunlight. English Box is the best of the low borders when you have a border that is partly in full sun and partly in deep shade.

For perfect English Box borders and hedges, we recommend a spacing of 5 plants per metre. The secret to making perfect English Box borders and hedges is to space your English Box closely.

Often people plant their English Box too far apart and they take forever to fill in. English Box tend to shoot upward instead of outward when they are younger. If English Box is spaced too far apart there will be upside down ‘U’ shaped gaps at the bottom of the hedge.

If you want to create a fast hedge, you can buy even more English Box plants, and plant them even closer.  One old English gardening book said to plant English Box plants only 1 inch apart.

At Hello Hello Plants we have found over the years that planting English Box at the rate of 5 per metre will create a dense bushy border in just a few years without making it unnecessarily expensive to establish a border. This can be upped to 6 per metre (or more) if you want to speed the process, or simply opt for larger plants.

For more information, visit our English Box Factsheet.