PLANT A HEDGE

A dense, nicely shaped hedge is part of the bread and butter of gardening, and easy to achieve if you select the right plants and follow a couple of tips. JENNY BALDWIN learnt the hard way.

I love this westringia hedge. It’s exactly the height I wanted, sitting about level with the old brick wall, making it easy to see into the garden I’m creating at the front of the house. It has formed a nice row of loose buns that are compact, flower from time to time, and require little to no water, even through a drought. But this hedge has a history. There were predecessors. Failures.

When I took over the garden, there was a hotchpotch of plants, from port wine magnolia to roses and azaleas. Deciding that I liked the gardenesque

‘one of everything’ style for the middle of the garden but not for the ‘frame’ of it, I removed all those plants and installed a row of gorgeous gardenias.

They all died. The site faces west, the sun was just too blistering, the soil was too dry (and, no doubt, too undernourished – I’m not the most regular dispenser of fertiliser), and the hedge failed.

Hedge number two was an exercise in wilfulness. Knowing that camellias would prefer similar conditions to the gardenias – but thinking I’d force them to do well if it killed me – I planted a row of japonicas with pure white blooms. They didn’t kill me, but I killed them.

Having wised up to the fact that the cottage garden I was creating would need to be a drought-tolerant one – salvias, buddlejas, echiums, roses, that type of thing – and by now mixing natives into all areas of my garden in multicultural boldness, I settled on Westringia ‘Oz-breed Aussie Box’. I haven’t looked back, and two years later it’s fully grown. So, first things first with a hedge: choose your plants carefully! Depending on the length of the hedge, you might be buying a lot of them.

STEP-BY-STEP

1 Remove weeds and the roots of former plants. Dig in aged manure and compost to nourish the soil.

2 Set up a stringline and position the plants under it.

3 Measure the distance between plants, aiming for even spacing.

4 Dig holes for the plants, tease out the roots, and pop them in.

5 Water well, and mulch.

6 Tip-prune leggy stems as new growth kicks in. When you cut from the top, it promotes side shoots and a bushy shape.

LEFT Two years later, the hedge is providing symmetry, unity and loose formality to an otherwise asymmetrical garden.