Boxwood is one of the oldest cultivated evergreens in the Western garden, and one of the most patient. The genus, Buxus, gave English the very word box, first for the hard pale wood itself, long prized by turners and instrument makers and engravers, and only later for the small containers cut from that wood. The living plant shares the same density. Buxus grows slowly, holds a deep even green through every season, and takes clipping as few other shrubs will, which is why box has edged parterres and framed doorways for centuries.

Left alone, a boxwood settles into a soft rounded mound. Sheared, the same plant becomes architecture: a low hedge that draws the line of a bed, a pair that marks an entrance, a clipped cone that holds a corner of the garden through the bare months when everything looser has gone to sticks. That calm green is the best possible foil for brighter, wilder planting, and box tolerates shade well enough to bring order where little else will grow tidily. We grow the familiar Buxus sempervirens beside less common kinds, the bold-leaved balearica and the small, bright-leaved harlandii among them.

Sharing the collection, and the family Buxaceae, are the sweet boxes, Sarcococca. Where true box is grown for form, these cousins are grown for scent. In the coldest, dullest weeks of winter the sweet boxes open flowers so small you may miss them at first, then throw a perfume out of all proportion to their size, honeyed and far-carrying, enough to fill a doorway or a whole shaded corner. Their name means fleshy berry, for the little black and wine-red fruits that follow. They are shade plants above all, glossy and quiet and undemanding, and they turn the difficult dry ground beneath trees into some of the most fragrant real estate a garden owns.

Both families ask for much the same, well-drained soil and decent air movement, with sun to part shade for the boxwoods and deeper shade for the sweet boxes. Clip the box in the growing season to keep an edge on the form, and leave the Sarcococca more or less to themselves. Set the evergreen structure against our Camellias and the rest of our Small & Medium Shrubs, and site the sweet boxes where their winter scent will cross a path.