Heinous Hedging

I wanted to talk about the art of hedging and what I have learnt about the subject.  Over the last 4 to 5 years I have been shaping and reshaping a hedge that spans the width of my property along the edge of the driveway.  It’s has been an ongoing project that I have constantly needed to rethink and redo. 

In the early stages of the hedge’s growth I let it do it’s own thing and waited till it had grown large enough to start shaping.  This tactic didn’t work well at all in fact it was horrible.  It looked nothing like a hedge, instead, it resembled, more accurately a number of sickly looking shrubs bunched into a line.  The lower parts of the plants had no leafy growth at all.  Most of the growth was localised at the very top of the plant.  I quickly realised that the hedge needed more constant attention. 

My second attempt to form a neat and bushy hedge had improved results.  I now knew that in order to get growth all over the plant, particularly the bottom, I needed to keep the plants short.  So I bit the bullet and pruned the bushes right back down to the base getting rid of all the initial growth.  It felt like a big waste and I know my mum can never bring herself to be that brutal but it had to be done.  I kept them short until they had thickened then slowly let them grow taller.  I made sure that the growth was even with no gaps by giving the plant time to fill into its shape as it got taller.  Eventually the hedge reached the desired height of about a metre. 

After a week of having the hedge at this height I noticed that there were large gaps starting to appear in the sides of the hedge.  I couldn’t understand why this was happening.  I had allowed the hedge to slowly grow and fill out.  I decided to research the plant and see how it had been grown in other gardens.  After looking at similar hedges I realised that I had grown mine too wide.  I had let the hedge grow out about a metre thick and as a result the plants were too small to sustain that amount of localised foliage.  The stress of this caused them to start loosing branches as a way of surviving.

So, again, I had to savagely attack the hedge in order to achieve the fullness I was after.  I took around a quarter off both slides of the hedge.  By now the plants had obviously established a well-formed root system as they bounced back impressively from their prune.  The hedge quickly thickened up at the side and there was no presence of any gaps.

Although I don’t like to do everything via mapped out instructions when it comes to gardening it definitely pays to do some research.  A lot of time and effort could have been put to better use if I had put a little time into researching the plant I was using and its growth habits.  Then again some people, like myself, have a lot of fun using the trial and error method.