By John Kessler | Dec 09/Jan 10 | 

Boxwood Style

Atlanta gardener Dan Cleveland has nurtured forty-three varieties of elegant boxwoods—right in his own backyard

“People can be so wary of boxwoods,” says gardener Dan Cleveland. “They’re afraid of making their gardens too stiff and too formal.” He shrugs and laughs. “Let me tell you: This is one of the most cottage-y gardens you’ll ever see.”

Cleveland stands in front of his garden in Atlanta’s Berkeley Park neighborhood, a garden full of informal, joyful exuberance, with boxwoods that swoop and tumble down the hill from his porch steps. Some cluster together, their rounded tops like Bubble Wrap. Others wind and curve through thick greenery. He counts forty-three distinct varieties—many of them heirloom cultivars he transplanted from his uncle’s Alabama farm a dozen years ago that have grown to three times their original size. Some stand nearly four feet tall.

We walk through a ribbon-like hedge of Korean boxwoods, parterred like the looping border ornamentation on an art nouveau poster, and then join a path where more boxwoods lead the way to the backyard.

“This scraggy one here’s a ‘Harlandi,’” says Cleveland, running his hand affectionately through its ragged, feathery mane. A slender boxwood that Cleveland identifies as ‘Dee Runk’ stands sentry nearby like a royal guard at attention. “It grows tall and pyramidal; you barely have to trim it,” he says. Underfoot a dwarf variety called ‘Grace Hendrick Phillips’ lists poetically to the side of its pot like a bonsai writ large.

“I rescued this plant,” he says, squatting to show how it has managed to regain its foliage from the outside in after years of stress. “People just let them go.”

Cleveland, who designs gardens for clients of the high-end store Boxwoods Gardens & Gifts, grew up on a farm in rural northwest Georgia and came to gardening naturally, first as a self-taught hobby, then as a passion, and eventually as a career. He has rescued dozens of unwanted plants through his work. Some clients wanted to be rid of the formal hedges they inherited from former homeowners. Others didn’t protect their plants from the defoliating leaf miner parasite, or they let them burn in the harsh Atlanta sun.

We round the corner into the backyard, where a fantastical doodle of boxwood parterres gives it what Cleveland calls “a lot of bones.” Some formal topiary appears now and then in the form of a ball or a pyramid, but whimsy is never far. A few rustic relics adorn the yard, which like many in Atlanta, is well shaded. A huge pecan tree looms to the side. In the far back, a dozen or more chickens peck around a custom-designed coop and attached run, a familiar reminder to Cleveland of his rural roots, even in the middle of a busy city.

Cleveland pauses to check the progress of a triple-ball boxwood topiary that he rescued last year. “This plant is probably forty years old,” he says, giving it a little squeeze around its middle ball. “I just love all these babies.”