Taking Control of Your Leylandii Hedge

We are asked the question ‘What can I do with this huge leylandii hedge?’ all the time – so we thought we would we run through the pros and cons of leylandii for domestic gardens and what to do if one has gotten out of control!

What is Leylandii?

Leylandii or Leyland Cypress is a fast growing evergreen that rapidly forms a dense hedge, and is easy to grow commercially. As a result, it is often the cheapest form of getting a rapid evergreen screen on garden boundaries, to hide unsightly views, or create privacy.

What is it good for?

Leylandii as mentioned above, is probably the quickest and cheapest way to get an immediate evergreen hedge or screen, so is beloved of developers and homeowners on a budget. They also will grow in almost any soil, and form a nice tight hedge when well maintained, which will give a good wind break, can be helpful in reducing dust and pollution, and can look very elegant in the right circumstances.

The Problem with leylandii

If left to its own devices a single specimen can easily reach 30m in height and spread 6m. They can grow at 75-90cm per year and will keep on growing! This growth rate drives most of the problems:

• They need to be cut back very regularly, ideally 2-3 times a year
• When allowed to grow (even if clipped regularly) they become huge- making the ongoing maintenance more expensive and often causing disputes with neighbours
• (and this is the big one!) If you cut back into the brown inner parts of the branches these will never regenerate leaving you with an ugly brown patch that you cannot do anything with. This also applies if you have a large hedge and take one tree out, perhaps to reduce the length of the hedge or remove a dead one- the sides of the trees that are left will likely be brown where they were touching the one removed and will never “green up”.
• This also applies to “topping” the trees- if you have huge leylandii trees you cannot just cut the tops off to reduce the height as you can with many other hedging species- you will simply end up with an ugly brown top to your hedge
• Linked to 2 and 3 above- if you miss a year or so on trimming the leylandii back, the branches will likely never be able to be cut back as far as they were beforehand without cutting into the brown branches- hence the trees inexorably get larger.

Additional problems are:

• They form a dense canopy which tends to overshadow everything underneath or around, and their huge roots will drain the surrounding soil of water and nutrients making the space under them barren
• There are now legal restrictions on evergreen hedging, and it will be your responsibility if your hedge blocks a neighbours sunlight or otherwise causes a nuisance to them. There is no legal maximum height as such, but once they are over 2m in height (which they will reach pretty fast!) a neighbour can make a legal complaint if they are being overshadowed or it is blocking a view.

What alternatives are there to using leylandii hedging?

There are plenty of alternatives although they all have some pros and cons. In my view the BEST ALTERNATIVES are:

a) Yew makes a wonderful hedge, (probably my favourite) although it is more slow growing and thus significantly more expensive for a given size, and hates being in waterlogged soils. It forms a really tight hedge when clipped and holds its form well.

b) Laurel – either cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus)

or Portuguese Laurel (Prunus Lusitanica)….

Laurel is fast growing (the cherry laurel is faster), commercially grown in large quantities, cheaper than yew, have attractive leaves, and can be trimmed to suit without the die back issues of the conifers.

c) Griselina- a rather more open structure with very attractive lime green leaves and pretty tolerant of most conditions. This is particularly good in coastal locations as it is salt tolerant.

All of these can be sourced online from Hedges Direct who also have a handy hedging calculator to help you decide how many you need.

The alternatives I don’t like and why:

d) Thuja plicata (western red cedar). Many people recommend this although I must say that I don’t like it- it is slower growing than leylandii but otherwise has the same problems and I simply don’t like the look of it!

e) Photinia Red Robin- this is so nearly a perfect plant- glossy leaves, nice flowers, pretty tough and a nice flush of red in the new growth each year. You will see it everywhere, but a little part of me dies when someone suggests it! My reasoning for this is that it is unpredictably temperamental- when it grows well it can look stunning, but it is very prone to fungal disease, leaf spot, sooty mould and others. It tends to defoliate (lose its leaves) if too dry or too wet. It is also not fully hardy so will tend to drop leaves in spring if the winter is hard. The combination of all these is that in my experience they are not reliable, and I have frequently found that even within a single plot you can have some that do well and others that don’t. I have not found a reliable way to correct this if one or more are failing.

So can I remove an unsightly leylandii hedge? And how do I make this look good!

Almost always the answer is yes. There is a cost to this of course- they can be large trees and will require a specialist to get them out, but I have never had a client regret this! You should check what views you are opening up and plan to screen anything that needs screening- there are plenty of more attractive trees that can be placed in key locations! Consider a hedging replacement such as the ones listed above, and aim to improve the soil first as this will be nutrient depleted.

Whilst this can feel like a huge task, and the hedge coming out can be quite shocking at first, the results can be utterly transformative- there is a great example from one of our clients here:

Leylandii Face Book Reel

Leylandii Garden Project

I would encourage you to consider the benefits- grab the extra space and light, get rid of the maintenance horror and grumpy neighbours, and look forward to a much more attractive garden!

CGLA are an award winning team of Garden Designers, Landscape Architects, Landscapers and Garden Maintenance Operatives working in Buckinghamshire, London and the South East, as well as on prestigious design projects across the UK and abroad. We are currently working in Oman, Jersey and France, and welcome enquires for design, landscaping or garden maintenance. Contact us here