Box Hill is one of the last vestiges of Box woodland in the UK.  The Box tree,  Buxus Sempervirens, is the same species as Box hedges in gardens.  It is ideal for topiary, with small oval leaves, slow growth, resilience to drought and, as it’s name suggests, it is evergreen.

Box trees are not large, up to 10-15 metres tall.  They thrive in the chalky alkaline soil on the top of Box Hill. Their wide shallow root system enables them to cling to the steep slopes of the North Downs and the Chilterns, where another area of Box woodland extends through the Prime Minister’s estate at Chequers. There are probably little more than 20 hectares left in this country.

Under the canopy Box trees are bare.  Their trunks are like spindles and even after 200 years growing they are little more than 20 centimetres in diameter. But this is enough to cut down for timber.  Box is the only true hardwood grown in Northern Europe.  This light coloured wood has been used to make small wooden objects that need to be hard,  tough and good looking such as chess pieces, tool handles and wheels for the rigging of wooden sailing ships.

My interest in encouraging the replanting of Boxwood is its use in woodwind instruments such as recorders, oboes and clarinets. They have a sharp crisp tone beloved now by modern recorder players. Boxwood is perfect also for baroque clarinets but modern instruments, with many more keys than their earlier brethren, need to be made of the even tougher imported African Blackwood.

The North and South Downs were much more heavily wooded 3000 years ago and then ware cleared during the Iron Age to make way for farming. Many conservationists are trying to protect this Iron Age landscape, partly because it has enabled certain rare species of orchids to survive.  But wild Boxwood forest is also endangered and should be encouraged, particularly with the appearance of Box Blight a fungal disease that risks devastating the little Box woodland that we still have.

So next time you cycle up Box Hill, spare a thought that you are cycling in the last of an ancient woodland that has stretched over the surrounding hills of London for many Millennia.

On my recent cycling holiday we peddled from Lake Garda to the Stelvio Pass.  We had some pleasant days passing lakes and rivers, through gorges and up a few steep climbs.  Overall we were gradually gaining height towards the Dolomites.

“Your German is not averse even to wild scenery, provided it be not too wild. But if he consider it too savage, he sets to work to tame it. I remember , in the neighbourhood of Dresden, discovering a picturesque and narrow valley leading down towards the Elbe. The winding roadway ran beside a mountain torrent, which for a mile or so fretted and foamed over rocks and boulders between wood covered banks. I followed it enchanted until, turning a corner, I suddenly came across a gang of eighty or a hundred workmen. They were busy tidying up that valley, and making that stream respectable. All the stones that were impeding the course of the water they were carefully picking out and carting away. The bank on either side they were bricking up and cementing. The overhanging trees and bushes, the tangled vines and creepers they were rooting up and trimming down. A little further I came upon the finished work— the mountain valley as it ought to be, according to German ideas. The water , now a broad, sluggish stream, flowed over a level, gravelly bed, between two walls crowned with stone coping. At every hundred yards it gently descended down three shallow wooden platforms. For a space on either side the ground had been cleared, and at regular intervals young poplars planted. Each sapling was protected by a shield of wickerwork and bossed by an iron rod . In the course of a couple of years it is the hope of the local council to have “finished” that valley throughout its entire length, and made it fit for a tidy-minded lover of German nature to walk in. There will be a seat every fifty yards, a police notice every hundred, and a restaurant every half-time.”

Even the spectacular waterfalls like grey mare’s tails swishing on the steep hillsides get cut off.   These Cutty Sarks use concrete, bricks and cobbles.

The water flowing freely away from the Stelvio Pass towards the Italian speaking region