What Should I Do About an Overgrown Conifer?

Conifers are the commonest reason people ring a tree surgeon, and they come with one rule that decides everything else. It is worth knowing before you collect quotes, because it determines whether what you want is possible at all.

The rule

Yew is the exception — a conifer that does reshoot from old wood, which is why it has been used for hedging and topiary for centuries. If you have a yew, the news is considerably better than the rest of this page suggests.

The two-minute check

Push a hand into the foliage and find how far in the green goes before it turns brown. Do it in several places, because they differ.

Why Redditch has a lot of these

Conifers were planted very heavily in the post-war decades, and a new town built during that period got them in quantity — as screening between properties, along boundaries, and as garden specimens sold as compact when they were three feet tall.

Forty years on, a great many of them are considerably larger than anyone intended, and because they went in at the same time, they have all reached that point together. It is a genuinely common Redditch situation rather than an unlucky one.

If there is enough green

Then a reduction is straightforward, and the practical considerations are the volume of material — substantial, because conifer is dense and heavy — and understanding what the result will look like.

A reduced conifer looks tidy and controlled rather than graceful. There are far fewer usable growth points than on a broadleaf tree, so the cut is more of a clipped shape than a natural one. Some people are perfectly happy with that and others are not, so it is worth asking to see a photograph of a similar job before agreeing.

Taking the top out

Often what people actually want, and worth covering honestly. Removing the top of a conifer to reduce its height is possible and it does work in the sense that the tree stops being as tall.

What it does not do is look natural. A conifer's shape depends on its leading shoot, and once that is gone the tree grows a flat or multi-headed top rather than a point. It also tends to widen afterwards, because the energy goes sideways instead of up.

So it is a legitimate option with a permanent consequence for the tree's appearance. Worth being clear-eyed about rather than surprised by.

If there is not enough green

• Live with it, cut annually within the green. The tree stays roughly this size but stops getting worse.
• Take the height only. Often available even when width reduction is not, because the top holds more green.
• Remove one from a group. Where there is a row, taking out alternate trees gives the remainder room without leaving a bare face.
• Remove and replace. The clean answer where the tree has simply outgrown the position.

That third option is underused and worth mentioning specifically, because conifers here were frequently planted in rows. Thinning a row rather than reducing every tree in it often produces a better result for less money.

If you replace it

Beech, hornbeam, yew and hawthorn all recover from hard cutting, so a replacement of that kind does not put you in the same position in twenty years. Another fast conifer gives you an identical problem on a delay.

And check what the conifer is screening before removing it. In a Redditch garden backing onto other housing, a mature conifer is frequently doing more privacy work than anyone has noticed, and a fence is generally limited to two metres under permitted development.

The permission point

Conifers get Tree Preservation Orders less often than broadleaves, but "less often" is not never — particularly where a mature specimen is prominent within an estate's landscaping. A TPO tree needs written consent from Redditch Borough Council at any size, and there is no small-tree exemption. One free phone call settles it.

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