The cross is dressed or redecorated with locally obtained box foliage.
The habitat is a mossy riverbank under a thick boxwood (Buxus) forest.
Two facades of the pentagonal arrangement face the two gardens cut into the hill; each garden is accessed across the moat by a drawbridge from the apartments on the piano nobile and each is a parterre garden of box topiary with fountains.
Keytops could be of plain boxwood, or lavishly decorated (as was often the case in northern Italy) with ivory, ebony, mother-of-pearl or tortoiseshell among other materials.
Buxus sempervirens | Buxus | buxus |
To the north of the mansion was located a garden, purportedly well known for its boxwoods, lilacs, and roses.
Examples of this can be found in the Buxus - Ironbark forests and woodlands of Victoria (Australia) where a large proportion of trees are coppice, resultant from timber cutting in decades gone by.
William and Mildred Lasdon Memorial Garden (0.4 ha / 1 acre) - an entrance court with a fragrance garden; a formal garden with boxwood hedges, heather, flowering annuals and bulbs, and a central fountain; and a synoptic garden featuring hundreds of shrubs whose names represent every letter in the alphabet, from "A" (Abelia) through "Z" (Zenobia).
Other species that are less common but may still be found in some areas include chestnut, birch, maple, pine and box.