Today wood engraving is flourishing again after a dismal patch in the 1960s and 70s when its simple black and white lines were thought to be dull and outdated. Like their predecessors, the new generation of engravers continue to work on boxwood whenever they could get it but it is in increasingly short supply. Lemonwood is the best substitute and is used by beginners to practise but it is inconsistent.
In the 1700’s there was a flowering of ‘naturalism’, the close following of nature in art and literature – Carl Linnaeus in Sweden, Gilbert White in Hampshire among many others. Duchesses were interested in botany, merchants and aristocrats founded zoos, clergymen recorded natural details of their environments.
Report by Dr Béatrice Henicot, Principal Plant Pathologist at the Royal Horticultural Society
In the mid-1990s, the fungus Cylindrocladium buxicola was introduced into the UK.
Boxwood was a familiar wood in the Classical era of Greece and Rome and is not infrequently mentioned in their literature. It might be of interest to boxwood enthusiasts, as it was to the author,
Boxwood has been known since Classical times and frequently appears in Roman literature. Loudon (1783 – 1843) was a landscape artist and encyclopaedist, writing an ‘Encyclopaedia of Gardening‘ and starting a vogue for ‘Gardenesque’, a style of garden design that had been out of fashion for a century.
For many boxwood authors and enthusiasts it is pleasing that their favourite wood had a role as precious timber in biblical times. The four references to boxwood usually quoted are Isaiah chapters 30, 41 and 60 and Ezekiel 27.
The banking Rothschild brothers built mansions for themselves in the Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire countryside of 19th century England. Baron Ferdinand Anselm de Rothschild (fig 1) was brought up in Vienna
Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild had an ambition to possess, at Waddesdon Manor, his Buckinghamshire estate, a cabinet of works of art of the highest quality and gradually to eliminate all that was in any respect of the second class. The meticulously carved miniature boxwood artefacts in the Waddesdon Bequest, bequeathed to the British Museum on his death in 1898, are one result of that ambition.
The restoration of the Earl of Leicester’s garden at Kenilworth Castle gave the team assembled by English Heritage an opportunity to examine our knowledge of what an Elizabethan garden consisted of, and how it actually looked. There have been several Tudor re-creations, perhaps the best being that at Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-on-Avon, masterminded by Ernest […]
Originally compiled by Mark Braimbridge (last addition made February 2014) Please note that the following list is of possible reading material. This does not imply endorsement by the EBTS. International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) and International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) are given where known. Adams, Katharina (2004) Buchs Kosmos Garten: Stuttgart ISBN 3440097978 Baker, Margaret […]