I glanced out of a window a week or so ago and noticed a brown patch in my box hedge. It looked just as if someone had put a hot saucepan on top of it – an almost perfectly round burn.
On closer inspection, the leaves had turned brown and fallen off, with some of them looking almost purply-black.
I’ve cut out the dead section, cutting a bit further back than I thought, and threw away the material (ie: I didn’t compost it). I tried to remove all the dead leaves and other bits and pieces that had fallen to the bottom of the hedge, but this was a bit difficult with all the stems and branches, but I did the best I could. I also cleaned my gloves and secateurs with a dilute bleach solution afterwards.
Hopefully, that will stop it, but I keep reading that it comes back.
Update: Apparently, a sure way to tell if it is box blight is to part the branches and see if there are black lines down them. If there are, then it is blight. I chopped it all out, so I can’t tell now! But I’m hopeful that perhaps it wasn’t that at all.
Gardening studies 