Boxwood Shrub Borders
Boxwood shrubs can be used to create borders anywhere in your yard. Such borders are essential to the success of professional Houston landscaping designs. Borders draw attention to forms and make them look more significant. Organic borders also lend vertical impact to the yard.
In many cases as well, borders help direct the flow of traffic between multiple points of interest. This allows visitors to your yard to do more than simply admire your landscape. By generating a sense of movement, it invites guests to move through the landscape and adds dynamic energy to outdoor events you hold in your yard.
Both hardscapes and gardens can be enhanced by this dynamic and resilient group of plants. There are approximately 70 different subspecies of the main Boxus species. Some grow very slowly and stay low to the ground. Others grow tall enough to rival small trees. This gives you the opportunity to border anything in your yard, including your house itself, with various types of boxwood shrubs.
While there are all kinds of websites that suggest you can do all kinds of nifty things with boxwoods to replace more elaborate landscape elements with trendy cost cutting alternatives, our approach to Houston landscape design adheres to more formal principles of blending architecture, hardscapes, and softscape into an actual outdoor living environment that rivals the interior of a home. As such, boxwood plants are primarily used to support other elements in our plans such as sidewalks, patios, and gardens.
We mentioned in the beginning of our article that low-growth boxwood shrubs can be used to direct traffic. This is true because a diminutive plant that is visible, yet low to the ground, draws your eye toward it. By planting boxwoods along the edges of brick walkways, stepping stone walkways, stone pathways, or even decorative concrete walkways, we can create dynamic energy in your yard that will direct your guests unconsciously on a journey that will take them on a guided tour of the landscape design you have invested so much in.
This saves you the trouble of being a tour guide for your next outdoor party, and it gives you more time to play a true host by letting the vegetation and the lighting direct the movements of your guests throughout the evening.
Boxwood shrubs also play a very powerful role in custom patio designs. Not everyone wants courtyard walls made of stone. However, large patios can look too much like slabs stretched out across the yard if they do not have some kind of vertical impact to give them definition. The larger species of Boxus are ideal for this. Many grow to just the right height to create a partial wall around the patio that still allows seated guests to see over the top of the hedges into the rest of the yard.
Very large species, of course, can be used in conjunction with tree walls to create a completely enclose, private lighted patio for honored guests or close family members.
On the organic side of Houston landscaping design, most gardens we build are also bordered by boxwood shrubs. The height of the plants here varies widely based on the size and style of the garden itself. One form of garden that you may be surprised relies heavily on this group of species is the contemporary garden. The small size of many Boxus species, combined with their slow growth and dark green color, makes them the ideal organic elements for a design that emphasizes limits on organic energy.
With so many different species to choose from, we recommend that you invest in a Houston landscaping plan for your entire yard before you go out and start buying boxwoods by the boxful. Exterior Worlds uses boxwood shrubs extensively in almost every type of landscape designs we do. You will almost always find them somewhere in pictures of the work we do.
However, the shrubs play a more subliminal role than a noticeable role in our designs. This subtlety is necessary to preserve the integrity of the landscape master plan. Overkill on any level, by any element, can aesthetically imbalance your yard and actually work against your property value. This is why we do not recommend do it yourself projects that involve planting boxwood shrubs around things you simply want to decorate.
Instead, let our team decorate your entire property with the right choice of species introduce with conscious, deliberate intention that contributes to a bigger picture of refined Houston outdoor living.