Hedges — which plants to choose and how to plant them

A good hedge is more than a green wall — it screens you from wind and prying eyes, marks a property boundary, and shelters birds and insects. The key decision at the outset: a deciduous hedge (cheaper, faster, but bare in winter) or an evergreen conifer hedge (year-round screening, but slower-growing and pricier).

Deciduous or evergreen — how to choose

Deciduous hedges (privet, hawthorn, firethorn) usually grow faster and cost less to plant, but — apart from the semi-evergreen firethorn — lose their leaves in winter, so screening is weaker. Evergreen conifer hedges (cypress, yew, arborvitae) give full, dense cover all year round, but grow more slowly and need patience through the first 2-3 seasons.

Rule of thumb: if speed and low cost are the priority, go deciduous. If year-round privacy matters (e.g. facing the street), invest in conifers.

The best deciduous species

• Wild privet — Poland’s most popular formal hedging plant. Fast, cheap, and takes frequent, hard pruning and regrowth from the base extremely well.
• Midland hawthorn — thorny, so it makes an effective barrier hedge, while also being highly valuable for birds and insects.
• Scarlet firethorn — semi-evergreen, thorny, with striking orange-red berries in autumn. Often confused with rockspray cotoneaster, but grows more compactly and has thorns.

The best conifers

• Lawson’s cypress — the classic choice for a clipped conifer hedge, with many colour forms (from green through blue-green to golden).
• Common yew — tolerates hard, precise pruning better than any other conifer and holds its shape the longest. Warning: it’s one of the most toxic garden plants there is (aside from the red aril around the seed) — with young children or pets around, consider an alternative.
• Hedge cotoneaster — an upright, dense shrub that copes well with pruning and urban conditions; a gentler choice than yew.
• Common boxwood — a low, formal edging hedge (e.g. around beds), though it needs watching for box tree moth, which has devastated plantings across Poland in recent years.

How to plant a hedge

1. Timing. Best in early spring or early autumn, when the soil is moist and the plant isn’t flowering or growing vigorously.
2. Spacing. Depends on species and the density you want — typically 2-4 plants per running metre for a formal hedge, fewer for an informal one. Use the planting calculator to work out spacing for a specific species and hedge length.
3. Soil preparation. Dig a continuous trench (not individual holes) along the whole hedge line, enrich the soil with compost, and add sand on heavy soils for better drainage.
4. Watering after planting. Water a newly planted hedge regularly through its first season — the shallow root system is at its most vulnerable to drought at this stage.

Formative pruning — when and how

Prune a young hedge in its very first year after planting — lightly shortening the shoots encourages branching from the bottom and prevents it from going bare at the base. Deciduous hedges are usually trimmed 1-2 times a season (June and August/September), conifers 1-2 times (spring and late summer) — avoid pruning in full sun and heat, so freshly exposed shoots don’t scorch.

You’ll find every species recommended for hedging in the hedging plants collection.