A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1351 entries
bosk
A small thicket of trees or bushes — smaller than a wood, denser than a copse, the kind of thing that occupies a field corner or a stream bend and that you go around rather than through. In landscape design, a bosk or bosquet is a planted grove used as a screen or a room, which is the same word doing formal work.
Etymology
Middle English bosk or busk, a variant of bush, and it sits at the meeting point of two families. On one side is Germanic *busk-, which gives English bush. On the other is Medieval Latin boscus, woodland, which produced French bois and bocage, Italian bosco, and Spanish bosque — the last of which came back into American English by an entirely separate route, through Spanish speakers in the Southwest, to name cottonwood forest along a river. So English holds both ends of the same root: bosk from the north, bosque from the south, and they mean nearly the same thing.