Hedges gives an organic feel to your home, softening the boundaries and helping your home to fit more easily into the landscape. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need timber fences as well, because they can be essential if you have small children or pets. It’s just that a hedge adds something special to your home, making them ideal for marking the boundaries of your property, lining the driveway and for creating rooms in your garden.
Hedges, however, do require regular maintenance to keep them healthy and maintain their shape.
So here are our top tips for keeping your hedges looking fabulous.
- Choose the right hedging plants.
- For a beautiful hedge, you need to select the right hedging plants from your nursery, otherwise you won’t achieve the right effect.
- For example barberry, boxwood, privets and juniper make excellent hedges.
- You also need to consider the height of these hedges, because you will need to keep them trimmed.
- If they are too tall you might need to use a ladder to get to the top of your hedges.
- Also, hedges that are left to overgrow not only look unsightly but can cause problems with neighbours if they get too big and unwieldy.
- Start to prune your hedges when they are new, training them into the form you need.
- In the first two years cut them back about 15cm to 20cm to encourage new growth near the main trunk, as this encourages a nice thick hedge to grow.
- Then in the third year you can start shaping your hedges and once you have the shape you want, just keep them trimmed to that shape.
- Don’t forget to check for birds’ nests before pruning, just in case!
