The boxwood bushes

The boxwood bushes, hidden in the woods between a narrow field and a stream behind 124 Bluestone Road, form a secret circular room that Denver discovers as a child. Five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring, have stretched toward each other over time to create a round, empty space seven feet high, with walls fifty inches of murmuring leaves. Bent low, Denver can crawl into this room and stand up fully in emerald light, a private sanctuary that becomes central to her inner life.

Formation and Description

The boxwood bushes are located beyond a narrow field that stops at a wood, with a stream on the other side. Hidden by post oaks, the five bushes have grown together to form a natural enclosure. The room is seven feet high, and its walls are fifty inches thick with leaves, creating a murmuring barrier that shuts out the outside world. The interior is bathed in emerald light, a quality that makes it feel magical and separate from the harsh realities of 124. Denver can enter by bending low and crawling through a gap, and once inside, she can stand upright, enveloped by the green walls.

Denver's Refuge and Playroom

The boxwood room begins as a little girl's houseplay, but as Denver's desires change, so does the play. It becomes first a playroom, where the silence is softer, then a refuge from her brothers' fright, and soon the place becomes the point. In this bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produces its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needs because loneliness wears her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she feels ripe and clear, and salvation is as easy as a wish. The room is a space where she can escape the haunting of 124 and the isolation imposed by her mother's past.

The Cologne and Sensory Details

Denver's visits to the boxwood room are accompanied by wild veronica until she discovers cologne. The first bottle is a gift, but the next she steals from her mother and hides among the boxwood until it freezes and cracks. This happens during a harsh winter that lasts eight months, one of the War years when Miss Bodwin brings Christmas cologne for Denver and her mother, oranges for the boys, and a wool shawl for Baby Suggs. The cologne, with its noisome signal, thrills the rabbits before confusing them, and it becomes a sensory marker of Denver's secret world. The scent of lily-of-the-valley cologne is later associated with the sweetness of Denver's secrets, contrasting with the bitterness of her mother's rememories.

The Vision of the White Dress

One autumn, long before Paul D moves into the house, Denver is in the boxwood room when she is made suddenly cold by a combination of wind and the perfume on her skin. She dresses herself, bends down to leave, and stands up in a thin, whipping snowfall, very like the picture her mother had painted when describing the circumstances of Denver's birth in a canoe straddled by a whitegirl. Shivering, Denver approaches the house, regarding it as a person rather than a structure. Looking through a window, she sees her mother on her knees in prayer, and next to her, a white dress kneeling with its sleeve around her mother's waist. This vision, which Denver interprets as the baby ghost or a spiritual presence, deepens her connection to the supernatural and to her own birth story.

Abandonment and Return

After Beloved arrives at 124, Denver stops visiting the boxwood room. She has not been in the tree room once since Beloved sat on the stump after the carnival, and she does not remember that she hasn't gone there until a desperate moment when she fears losing Beloved. The room, once her refuge, is replaced by Beloved's presence, which provides a racing heart, dreaminess, society, danger, and beauty. The boxwood room, with its emerald light and cologne, represents a past self that Denver leaves behind as she becomes more entangled with Beloved and the outside world. Its abandonment marks a shift in Denver's character from solitary imagination to active engagement with others.

Thematic Significance

The boxwood bushes embody the tension between isolation and connection, imagination and reality. For Denver, the room is a transitional space where she can be herself without the fear of her mother's past or the community's judgment. It is a place of safety and self-discovery, but also of loneliness. The room's eventual abandonment reflects Denver's growth and her need to step out of the yard to seek help, a move that ultimately saves her family. The boxwood bushes, with their living walls and emerald light, remain a potent symbol of the inner life that Denver must leave behind to enter the world.