Can a Large Hedge Be Made Smaller Without Removing It?

For most hedges, yes — and further than people expect. This is the main practical difference between hedges and trees: a tree can be reduced by perhaps a third, whereas a broadleaf hedge can often be taken right back to its framework and will come back thicker than it was.

Why hedges take it and trees do not

It is not luck. The plants traditionally used for hedging were chosen precisely because they respond to hard cutting by thickening from the base — that is the entire basis of hedge-laying, which has depended for centuries on hawthorn and its relatives being cut almost to the ground and regrowing.

The exception, and it is a firm one

Conifers other than yew do not regrow from bare brown wood. Leylandii, Lawson, thuja and spruce all share this. Cut past the green and the exposed brown stays brown for as long as the hedge stands.

So on a conifer hedge the achievable reduction is capped at the depth of live green. Push a hand into the foliage — the top and each face separately, because they differ — and find how far in the green goes. That measurement is the limit, whatever figure you had in mind.

How much smaller, by species

Staging it

On a broadleaf hedge needing a lot off both faces as well as the height, the gentler route is to do it across two or three years: one face and the height in year one, the other face once the first has regrown.

This keeps the hedge working while it recovers and it never looks completely bare from both sides at once. It costs more in total, so it is a judgement about how much the appearance matters meanwhile — and where the hedge is screening something, it is almost always worth the extra.

Timing

Late winter, before growth starts. The hedge then has the whole season ahead of it to recover, and it looks bare for one summer rather than two.

A hard cut in July stresses the hedge when it is least able to respond, and the recovery is slower and patchier. If a hard reduction is what you need and it is currently midsummer, waiting is usually the right call.

Reset the profile while you can

A reduction is the one moment a hedge's shape can properly be fixed, and it is worth doing rather than just putting it back where it was.

• Put a batter on the faces — wider at the base than the top — so light reaches the bottom and the base stays dense.
• Take it lower than your target height; it will grow.
• Take the width in further than feels comfortable, for the same reason.
• Square the ends properly.
• Clear the base of weeds, ivy and stacked material while you can reach it.
• Establish a line, and ask for the same line at every future cut.

That last point is what actually stops the problem recurring. A hedge cut back to a fixed line every year stays the same size indefinitely; one cut to wherever the growth has reached drifts outward no matter how often it is done.

Trees in an old hedge

Worth checking on any long-established boundary before work starts. A hedge cannot carry a Tree Preservation Order, but a tree grown up within one can, and an old hedge that has become a line of trees can be covered too.

Moreton-in-Marsh's conservation area covers the centre of the town, so a tree in a hedge there needs six weeks' written notice to Cotswold District Council unless its stem is under 75mm across, measured 1.5m above the ground. A tree with a TPO needs written consent at any size. The hedge around it stays unrestricted either way.

More Moreton-in-Marsh Hedge Maintenance Guides

Also in Moreton-in-Marsh

Hedge Maintenance in Moreton-in-Marsh →
Tree Surgery in Moreton-in-Marsh →
All hedge maintenance guides →