Hedges
I have been clipping our hedges. It is one of the most satisfying tasks you can do in your garden. We have several hedges, mostly small in height but delightful to the eye. They include box/buxus (naturally), murraya, mandenas, prostrate gardenias, lillypilly and a few photinia robusta. The front and side fence has a camellia sasanqua hedge with 120 plants grown from seeds now standing one and a half metres tall and beginning to flower with magnificent pink flowers.
Hedges are nothing more than shrubs or low trees planted in a row to form a fence. Hedges can be natural, looking like they were grown in the wild, or they can be more formal, pruned into a certain shape, usually squared. Hedges serve a variety of purposes and come in a variety of sizes. Hedges can be worked into nearly any garden situation.
Hedges are generally easy to care for, taking no more attention than a tree or shrub. Once established, many types of hedges will require no care whatsoever, unless the gardener chooses to trim them to shape. The choice of shrub or tree greatly affects what care needs to be taken for the hedges to survive.
Hedges can grow in nearly any growing condition possible. The sheer variety of shrubs and trees that make excellent hedges is amazing. One way to make a different looking hedge is to use different species and types of plants together. The variety used can make a very bold statement.
Hedges serve many purposes in the garden and landscape. Hedges can make a great wind block especially hedges of large Cyprus trees. Hedges are good privacy screens, and can be a wonderful looking alternative to a fence or other such divider. Whatever the use, a gardener will thrill at the ease of growing hedges.
I can never think of hedges without thinking of the English countryside. Few things have helped create the look of the English countryside more than hedgerows. Hedges have been used for a long time in England, yet for all their antiquity, much of the familiar checkerboard pattern they help create is of recent vintage.
Hedges have been used as field boundaries in England since the times of the Romans. The Anglo-Saxons also used hedgerows extensively, and many that were used as estate boundaries still exist. Although these early hedges were used as field enclosures or to mark the boundaries of one person’s property, there was no systematic planting of hedges in England until the first Enclosure Movement of the 13th century.
The pressures of population expansion led to a widespread clearing of land for agriculture, and the new fields needed to be marked clearly. Later, farming expansion in the 15th century led to more widespread hedge planting, but the greatest use of hedges came in the Enclosure Movement of the 18th and 19th centuries for the purpose of raising sheep.
Hedges are used as field boundaries in the lowland regions of England. In the highlands, such as the Yorkshire Dales, dry stone walls are commonly used. In the process of enclosure many rural labourers lost their livelihood and had to move to the new industrial urban centres. In Scotland thousands of crofters emigrated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and tens of thousands sheltered without homes on the sea shore where they perished in the winters.
So the next time you sigh over the timeless quality of the English hedge-shaped countryside, spare a thought for the misery and hardship caused by the erection of hedged fields to much of England’s and Scotland’s rural population.
Recent years have seen the disappearance of many miles of English hedgerows. It is easier for modern farmers to string new metal fence wire than to maintain ancient hedgerows. Conservation efforts have introduced incentives to farmers to maintain the hedges as they are important habitat for small creatures and birds, and losses have slowed somewhat.
Estimates vary, but there may be upwards of 500,000 miles of hedgerows in England today. Hedges are also very commonly used in New Zealand using varieties of thorn and prickle bushes.
Plants have been pruned by gardeners through out the ages, and in most countries, not only to create better plants with their shapes and crop yields, but particularly for special effect or garden decoration.
Topiary is derived from a roman word “topiarius” meaning landscape gardener. Further it defines any plants manipulated or pruned and bent to our will i.e. not created by nature. A lawn is really a form of topiary as we mow what would become tall grass into manicured lawn.
Roman noblemen were creating hedgerows, borders and avenues of cypress, centuries before Christ. By 100 AD box and rosemary hedges were common in prestigious properties and villas. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italian monks, well educated people, kept the skills alive and improved them to the point that they could create large scenes of imaginary figures and characters; all clipped from plants growing usually on an iron or wire frame.
With French invasions of Italy around 1500, Topiary spread throughout France as one of the spoils of war. The Royal Family claimed it as their own, added and improved the standard – creating complex ‘Parterre’, ‘Alleys’ and ‘Avenues’ on a grand scale, with sculpture, walled rooms and espaliers.
By the mid 1600’s grandiose schemes of topiary gardens, huge vistas of tailored forests, boulevards of trees and parterre were all being played out on a tapestry of hundreds of acres by King Louis 14th using some 30,000 workers.
The Versailles Palace & grounds expressed the popularity and pinnacle of formal topiary. Copies popped up throughout Europe, England and even China by the 1700’s. By 1700-1800 from England came a backlash to Man’s tampering with nature and the clergy opposed it, as it was felt this manipulation was evil. And so English landscape architects brought about a new type of gardening – informal flowering cottage style gardens with landscapers like Capability Brown.
Many of the greatest examples of topiary, parterre, and hedges were destroyed during this topiary backlash. Topiary fell out of favour for nearly 200 years until earlier last century when a revival began, particularly with the Americans and then resurgence began in recreating the great Topiary and Parterre gardens from the Renaissance period throughout Europe and including Versailles.
Bonsai is an example of clipped topiary, although I am sure specialists would disagree on this point. The hedge is generally built of one type of tree or shrub. The idea of using two or more varieties of unrelated plants is rarely considered, yet an interesting feature can be developed by so doing. Such a hedge could be the only colour note in a small garden, with one contrasting tree as a lawn specimen; it could be planted across the front and down each side of the front garden.
Various plants are suitable for combination. Green Cypress can be used as pillars at regular intervals in a rose hedge such as Lorraine Lee. A golden Privet hedge could be made with a green species for pillars (but be careful, privet in some areas is a noxious weed.) There used to be hundreds of them in Melbourne’s more formal gardens. Japonica can be trained espalier fashion in a narrow border with an occasional Pencil Cedar to break the line.
Such combined planting is, of course, not in accordance with the accepted idea of a hedge – yet it takes the place of one, and is better than close, massive growth in a narrow area, having a more natural appearance.
Natural, or untrimmed, hedges can be made by using one variety of plant which is of attractive growth and flower, and which retains a neat appearance without the usual clipping into shape. It must, of course, be cut occasionally. The cutting or pruning is rather a matter of removing odd, unevenly growing branches and old, worn-out wood. A hedge of this type looks well with an odd specimen tree or two planted in its length. Flowering fruits serve this purpose excellently, or well-colored foliage trees.
A third type of hedge is sometimes used. It is a dwarf edging to not more than two feet, trimmed and kept as neatly as the large hedge. Such a planting is useful at the edge of a wide garden border, or it can be used to divide the vegetable garden from the flower garden, particularly in a small area where there is no room for a shrub border.
A hedge effectively blocks the view of the vegetables, without shutting out the distant view. Sometimes a dwarf hedge of this sort is planted either side of a garden path or along the wall of a house. Regularly spaced pillars or balls add to the effectiveness of the dwarf hedge, particularly if it is only knee high. That is what we have done along our front verandah, using tall Cyprus a metre high at each of the pillars.
To produce a compact hedge of from six inches to a metre in height, it is necessary to plant very closely, as near as four inches apart for the very dwarf hedge, to nine inches apart for the taller one.
We have planned a bed of English Lavender, which must be allowed to grow fairly naturally till it has flowered, and which is best cut back to a formal, small hedge. In our case I am planning for a very wide low hedge.
A word about clippers. I have a set of electric shears but prefer not to use them. If you use a manual pair of clippers or shears, make sure they are kept with sharp blades. It will halve your work.
Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC