All boxed up! Easy and effective display

I love box!  I noticed these lovely simple, elegant displays outside a restaurant on the Boulevard des Italiens.  They would look simple and effective on a small balcony or a deck, or for a larger space, repeated to give a minimalist but pretty green display.

Box is a very versatile plant.  It likes dry conditions, so it doesn't fuss too much if you forget to your watering, in fact it doesn't like being waterlogged.  It does well in shade or sun, dry soils, it's evergreen, can stand a frosty winter and a hot summer.  It's flexible in that you can trim it to all sorts of shapes.  The only thing is that it grows ever so slowly so either you need patience or a large budget to buy mature plants (they are really expensive - for example a small ball of 35-40cm might cost around 55 Euros and a larger one of 90 - 100cm is a whopping 400 Euros).  But it's easy to plant and very rewarding.  There are many types of box, each with different sizes of leaves, different shades of green and so on, so that you can play around with them and use them to great effect.

Here's a useful link if you'd like to know more about growing box (buxus sempervirens).

http://www.boxtrees.com/topiary.html

And here's the pictures:-

ps I saw some box hedges at a pub this weekend.  They were, very obviously, FAKE!  Don't go there, it is so easy to grow and faked, it looks really nasty.  Must try harder!