Getting the Timing Right for Hedge Cutting and New Planting

Planting is the part of garden work where the visible effort and the actual outcome are least connected. A shrub goes in correctly in half an hour. Whether it is thriving in three years is decided over the following two summers, by things that take a few minutes at a time and are easy to skip.

Hedge timing, including the bit that is law

Start with the non-negotiable one. Wild birds, their nests and their eggs are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, and the main nesting season runs from roughly March to August. In practice that means hedges are checked before they are cut during those months, and work is deferred where there is an active nest. This is not a formality, and it is a reasonable question to ask any contractor how they handle it.

Beyond that, timing follows the plant. Formal evergreen hedging such as privet, box or laurel takes a trim in late spring once the first flush has hardened, and often a second tidy in early autumn. Beech and hornbeam prefer a single cut in late summer, which is what gives beech its copper winter leaf. Conifers are the ones to be careful with: most will not regenerate from bare old wood, so a hedge allowed to overshoot cannot simply be cut back to where it used to be.

• Cut too early in spring and the fresh growth that follows can be caught by a late frost.
• Leave it too late in autumn and soft new growth goes into winter undamaged and unhardened.
• Let a light trim become a hard cut-back and recovery takes seasons rather than weeks.

The first two years decide everything

A newly planted hedge or shrub has a root system sized for the pot it came out of, not for the ground it is now in. Until those roots spread, the plant cannot reach the moisture that established planting takes for granted, and it is entirely dependent on what happens at the surface.

• Water deeply and less often. A long soak that reaches down encourages roots to follow it; a daily sprinkle keeps them at the surface where they are most vulnerable.
• Water through dry spells even here. A fortnight without rain in a Scottish June will kill new hedging that has been left to fend for itself.
• Mulch a good depth around the base but not against the stem, to hold moisture in and keep weeds off the water the plant needs.
• Prune formatively in the first two years. On hedging this means cutting the leader back to force branching low down, which is what gives a hedge a dense base rather than a leggy one.

That last point is the one people find counterintuitive. Cutting a new hedge back feels like undoing progress, but a hedge that is allowed to race upward in its first two years is thin at the bottom permanently, and no amount of later trimming fixes it.

Choosing for the conditions you actually have

Gardens across Paisley, Houston and Bridge of Weir deal with high rainfall, heavy ground in the low-lying parts and real exposure to wind coming up the Clyde. Planting chosen for a sheltered southern garden will spend its life struggling here. Species selection against actual exposure, soil and light is most of what makes a planting scheme succeed, and it costs nothing extra to get right at the point of ordering.

What a new scheme needs is explained when it goes in. For anyone who would rather not track watering and formative pruning through two seasons, it can be picked up as part of regular garden maintenance instead.