Boxwood on the Brain: Arthur Shurcliff’s Colonial Revival Gardens

Arthur A. Shurcliff as a young man

Long before he took up the position of landscape architect at Colonial Williamsburg, Arthur A. Shurcliff had already begun his love affair with boxwood. Thirty years before he arrived in Williamsburg, in the summer of 1898, Shurcliff and his friend Bob Bellows took a bicycle tour of the historic town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. At this time, Shurcliff was working as an apprentice in the landscape architecture office of John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., so this was a working vacation as well as a pleasure tour. Shurcliff kept detailed notes of his trip in a notebook entitled “Log of 5 Days in Newburyport, August 1898,” and he wrote in this journal that it was “Dedicated to an old box hedge.” This shrub, of the genus Buxus, was first introduced to North America in the mid-17th century but would reach its peak popularity in the 20th century as the quintessential Colonial Revival planting—thanks, largely, to Arthur Shurcliff.

19th-century botanical illustration
of Buxus sempervirens

 Arthur and Bob visited old houses, made gravestone rubbings, and sought out what they called “antique” gardens. Shurcliff wrote in his journal, “Wednesday morning saw me in the old-fashioned gardens of the heart of the town. These old places although now gone to decay are filled with a kind of golden glory which is lacking in the new gardens. The old lattice trellises and ruined box hedges and even the weedgrown paths seem to have the glamor of the sunshine of the olden days that are only to be lived over again in books or in these old gardens themselves.” In addition to these musings, Shurcliff drew garden plans and made a list of plants he had been informed were “old-fashioned.”

It’s clear that Shurcliff felt that there was something special about boxwood, perhaps because it was one of the few plants that could potentially have survived since the time when these antique gardens were new. A few years after his trip to Newburyport, Shurcliff published an article in House & Garden about two Nantucket gardens that dated from the early 19th century. He also believed that there was “evidence to support the tradition that they were copied from much older gardens then in their prime”—but what this evidence might be, Shurcliff did not say. Nonetheless, here, too, boxwood played an important role. Boxwood hedges marked the main outlines of the garden's plan, and boxwood was used for decorative effects, being planted and trimmed into “ribbons, strings, and knobs.”

Foliage of Buxus sempervirens, or American boxwood

It comes as no surprise, then, that when Arthur Shurcliff became Colonial Williamsburg’s landscape architect in 1928, one of the first things he did was begin a collection of boxwoods. First he gathered them from Williamsburg and the immediate vicinity, but soon had to go further afield, to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, in order to supply the demand created by his plans. In addition to the plants that were grown in Williamsburg, entire mature boxwood hedges were purchased and transplanted to the historic area in order to create instant fullgrown plantings. By March of 1934, the Restoration had purchased and transplanted one and a half miles of boxwood.

Although there was very little hard evidence for the presence of boxwood in Williamsburg’s gardens in the 18th century, Shurcliff felt that his studies of other southern gardens justified their presence. In his first report to Restoration architects Perry, Shaw & Hepburn, he argued, “in replanting the Williamsburg places much use should be made of Box even to the extent of allowing it to dominate the parterres and bed traceries of which it once formed only a part.” Along with Shurcliff’s romantic love of boxwood was a practical reason—“Generous use of box in this manner is also justifiable because the display and upkeep of flowers especially in the dry season would not be necessary.”

St. George Tucker House before restoration

To Williamsburg residents, Shurcliff’s obsession with boxwood was a bit puzzling. Mrs. George Coleman, who lived in the St. George Tucker house, wrote in her diary of an encounter with Shurcliff in January 1931: “Today I was asked to go over the Tucker House yard with Mr. Arthur Shurcliff...to discuss the laying out of brick walls, boxwood hedges, etc. I found him a very alarming person! Somehow the idea of changing the yard and garden is much more repellent to me than changing the house, and this is such a terribly enthusiastic man!”

Boxwood in the restored Tucker House garden

In May 1931, Shurcliff was back, “[coming] down like a wolf on the fold again today. He rushed in and out several times with charts and plans for all sorts of alarming ‘landscapes’ in our yard. He has boxwood on the brain.” However, like most people, Mrs. Coleman found it impossible to resist the force of Shurcliff’s ideas, and even ultimately came to like his plans for the Tucker house garden. 

Others were much more easily won over by Shurcliff’s garden designs. As soon as Colonial Williamsburg officially opened in 1934, his Colonial Revival style gardens—and boxwood—began appearing all over the United States. However, there is still some debate as to whether boxwood can successfully be grown in this part of the country. If anyone has experience with it, we would love to hear from you!

Sources:

M. Kent Brinkley and Gordon W. Chappell, The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1996).

Elizabeth Hope Cushing, Arthur A. Shurcliff: Design, Preservation, and the Creation of the Colonial Williamsburg Landscape (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

Charles B. Hosmer, Jr., “The Colonial Revival in the Public Eye: Williamsburg and Early Garden Restoration,” in Alan Axelrod, ed., The Colonial Revival in America (Winterthur: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1985), 52-70.

American Boxwood Society

F. S. Lincoln, “St. George Tucker House Kitchen,” John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accessed April 29, 2015, https://rocklib.omeka.net/items/show/566.

“St. George Tucker House Before Restoration,” John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accessed April 29, 2015, https://rocklib.omeka.net/items/show/564.