Hedging and hedges – deciduous species

Deciduous hedges have a number of advantages, because they are looser in structure, they filter harsh winter winds which means they don’t create the damaging turbulence associated with dense evergreen hedges which can funnel icy air right into tender plants and shrubs. If you’d like to plant a native deciduous hedge, excellent species include:

• Carpinus betulus - the hornbeam, which can be maintained from three feet tall to eighteen feet, it looks a little like the beech but has less tendency to die back.
• Fagus sylvatica – the beech, either common or copper, which can be kept as low as four feet and grows to about twelve feet.

Both can be kept as a formal hedge and provide screening in winter as they retain brown leaves until spring. Pruning in late summer keeps these in check, and they can safely be hard pruned if you need to restore and revitalise overgrown areas.

For more informal mixed hedging, native hedgerow species will help attract wildlife, providing them with shelter and food and mixed hedging stands a much better chance of looking good in its first few years because even if one or two plants die off, the mixed nature of the planting stops the gaps standing out. An excellent mixture could be composed of:

• Acer campestre (field maple) – pretty leaves
• Corylus avellana (hazel) – produces nuts for birds to eat
• Crataegus monogyna (hawthorn) – thorny and dense
• Euonymus europaeus (spindle) – thorny and pretty flowers
• Prunus spinosa (blackthorn) – white flowers on bare stems very early in the year, thorny.

Hedge gardening deciduous hedge photograph by nationalrural, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

 

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