Boxwood Blues
Josh Meyer was ten days into his position as the director of buildings, gardens, and grounds at Tudor Place Historic House and Garden in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood when a staff gardener told him something was up with the boxwood. This was on a Friday last October, and Meyer, trained as a landscape architect, didn’t think much of the minor defoliation and leaf spotting. “But here’s where it gets crazy,” he says. “We came back on Monday, and the symptoms had spread to pretty much all the collection areas. You could see this thing just descending on the property.”
The “thing” was boxwood blight, a fungal disease wiping out generations-old boxwood with the heartless efficiency of an Ebola epidemic. Within weeks, the
