Box blight is here. Here's what to plant instead.
Box has been hit hard across England by box blight and the box tree caterpillar. If yours is browning, the news is not that you should panic. It is that the three replacements actually worth specifying are not the ones most nurseries lead with.
If you have a box hedge, the kind of low clipped line that edges a Victorian front path or a parterre, and parts of it are browning, dying back, or full of webbing in the canopy, you are dealing with one of two problems, and sometimes both. If your box is still healthy and you want to keep it that way, the box hedge trimming guide covers the Derby Day timing and the blade-sterilisation protocol that limits blight spread during each cut.
The two killers
Box blight (Calonectria pseudonaviculata) is a fungal disease first recognised in the UK in the mid 1990s. It shows up as brown patches on the foliage, black streaks and dieback on young stems, and, in wet weather, white spore masses on the undersides of infected leaves. It spreads in water, on tools and on boots, and through movement of infected plants. The fungi can survive on fallen leaves for years. The RHS recommends not relying on fungicides, which are unlikely to work unless combined with good hygiene and other control measures.
Box tree caterpillar (Cydalima perspectalis) is a more recent arrival: the first adult moth reached Britain in 2007, and caterpillars were found in private gardens from 2011. It eats and webs together box foliage, often leaving the outer canopy looking fine until you push your hand in and find webbing and damage inside. Heavy, repeated defoliation can leave plants with large dead patches. For the timing and treatment options, see our guide to identifying and treating box tree moth caterpillar.
In the south-east, with mild winters and damp spells, both problems are common. Wet weather helps the blight spread, and warm weather suits the caterpillar.
Quick test: is it blight or caterpillar?
Push your fingers gently into the canopy. If you feel webbing and small green caterpillars, it’s the caterpillar (or both). If the leaves are browning and falling, stems show black streaks, and there are white spore masses on the undersides of leaves in wet weather, it’s blight. The RHS notes that caterpillar damage shows webbing, caterpillars and curved chewed edges, while blight does not.
What to plant instead
The wider gardening internet will offer you a dozen “box alternatives.” Most aren’t. Here are the three that I would look at first for a Canterbury garden, in the order I would specify them.
1. Ilex crenata (Japanese holly)
The closest visual match to box. Tight, small, dark-green leaves. Tolerates clipping to within a centimetre of itself. It is slow: a young plant put in this autumn will take a few years to make a usable knot hedge, so if you want an instant edge, budget for larger nursery stock. Check drainage before you buy, and check that your soil suits it.
The cultivars worth asking for by name are 'Convexa' (rounded leaf, very dense), 'Dark Green' (faster-growing, less tidy), and 'Stokes' (the densest of the three, the box-replacement standard). Avoid generic "Japanese holly", there's a wide range of vigour and you can end up with the wrong end of it.
2. Yew (Taxus baccata)
If your hedge was over knee-height, yew is the right answer. It's native to the North Downs chalk just south of the city, so it's already happy on Canterbury's geology. It hates waterlogging, which means it actually performs better on our thin chalk topsoil than on the heavier loam in the Stour valley bottom, counter-intuitive, but it's about drainage, not depth.
The case for yew over box: it is long-lived and regenerates from old wood. The case against: it is not as low-growing as box. The minimum sensible yew hedge is around 60cm.
3. Euonymus japonicus
The dark horse. Brighter, slightly larger leaves than box or Ilex crenata. Tolerates the chalk, tolerates a hard clip, and unlike yew is fine in partial shade, useful in the older Canterbury gardens where mature trees have closed the canopy. The cultivar to specify is 'Green Spire' for an upright habit, or 'Microphyllus' if you want something closer to box's tight scale.
One warning: Euonymus can sucker in light soils, and it can be troubled by scale insect. For the full trimming guide, including the two-cut year, variety-based tool choice, scale pest and hard renovation, see our Euonymus japonicus hedge trimming guide.
What you'll be offered that doesn't work
Privet is the obvious cheap substitute. It clips well, it's fast, it's local. It's also semi-deciduous on chalk in a cold winter, throws out fast lush growth that needs cutting three times a year, and looks nothing like box in either leaf or habit. Fine for a tall boundary hedge. Wrong for a low knot.
Lonicera nitida ("box-leaf honeysuckle") gets recommended a lot and shouldn't. It's quick, yes, but it's structurally floppy, you spend the rest of the hedge's life staking it back into shape after every rain shower. It also doesn't take a hard clip the way box does; you can't get the crisp parterre lines that the box was there for. If you already have a Lonicera nitida boundary hedge and want to keep it in good shape, our Lonicera nitida trimming guide covers the three-cut year and how to renovate one that has been let go.
Box again, treated. Some nurseries will sell you less susceptible cultivars. The RHS names 'Faulkner', 'Heritage' and 'Renaissance' among them, and says Buxus microphylla cultivars are generally less susceptible than common box. They are more resistant, not immune, and common box and 'Suffruticosa' are very susceptible. If the blight is already established in the soil and surrounding planting, you are buying yourself a few extra years before the same problem returns. Sometimes that is the right call (a small heritage garden where authenticity matters). For most gardens, it isn’t.
If you decide to replace
Three practical notes.
Take everything out, including the roots. Box blight survives on fallen leaves and in the soil. Leaving root fragments and fallen foliage in the bed means your replacement will be sitting in an active reservoir of the fungus. The RHS advice is to bag infected material and bin it rather than compost it, and to strip off the top of the soil surface when conditions are dry. Do not put it in a garden-waste bin.
Choose a plant that is not box. Do not replant box into a bed that has had blight. Ilex crenata is much less susceptible to blight than box, which is why it appears at the top of the list.
If your old hedge is inside a conservation area, shrubs and hedges are not normally treated as trees, so the removal of box plants usually does not need a section 211 notice. But if there is any mature tree within the hedge line, a holly, a yew standard, anything with a stem over 75mm at 1.5m, that does need six weeks’ written notice to the council. Easy to overlook on an old, lost-in-the-canopy line. We check before quoting.
Want this looked at?
Send a couple of photos and your postcode to hello@canterburyhedges.co.uk, or call 07763 100 477. We'll tell you whether what you're seeing is blight, caterpillar, or something else, and what the realistic options are. No obligation.
Sources: Royal Horticultural Society, box blight and box tree caterpillar pages (rhs.org.uk); GOV.UK, Tree Preservation Orders and trees in conservation areas. Checked 12 October 2026.