Another update on our boxwood hedge... It hadn’t been trimmed for years and was dying from the inside out... We tried several times to revive it by pruning it back, then it started sprouting new growth, but last year the box tree moth came along and finished it off 😒😒😒 So we needed new plants—a nursery had restocked its inventory, and I quickly stuffed my car full of Japanese holly. This was followed by a complete clear-out of the hedge bed, including a partial replacement of the soil (think ground elder, peppermint, stinging nettles, field bindweed), and we built up the bed into a small mound with an “outdoor staircase” to create more planting space. We then planted the holly on the “outdoor steps”—oh… looks like I bought more plants than we needed after all… but only 24 too many 😇. The holly plants were pruned and watered, and they got flowery and herbaceous neighbors; even the added soil brought some gifts of its own (garlic rue, Mediterranean strawflower, rock stonecrop…), the bed is coming along quite nicely, and you can already make out the “hedge.” The remaining holly plants had to wait out another year in their pots—stored in the greenhouse over the winter—and they survived. Now we’ve finally leveled the area in front of the pony stable, and they’ve been planted to form a small hedge frame. I’m already looking forward to next year, when you’ll be able to recognize them as a proper hedge 🥰