hedge cutting

I spent today trimming the Eleagnus x ebbingei hedge, or at least the side of it that faces the drive.  The Systems Adminstrator had made a start, but the hedge was growing to a point where it was getting impossible for delivery vehicles to get around the turning circle, and since the S.A. is also trying to paint the back of the house and change the gutters, and take the truck for its MOT (fingers crossed on that one), it was agreed that I'd step in as officer in charge of hedges.

It is a large hedge, in every sense.  It is over thirty paces long, stretching from the corner of the house almost to the boundary, and is up to the eaves, the equivalent of two storeys high, and starting to tickle the electricity cable.  It would like to be equally wide, but then we wouldn't be able to get up the drive.  It was planted as a wind-break, and to divide the garden internally between front and back, and it fulfils both of these tasks.  Blackbirds nest in it each spring, and birds, including the chickens, eat the fruits.  At this time of the year it has small, unshowy white flowers that are deliciously scented of old-fashioned clove carnations, and indeed I feel very mean trimming them off, except that it has to be reduced if we are to have an oil delivery, or a new mattress, or a pallet of strulch, or before long for us to use the turning circle at all, even in a small Skoda.

Eleagnus x ebbingei is an evergreen.  The old leaves are olive green, the new ones silvery.  It will tolerate strong winds, including coastal ones, and poor, dry soil, otherwise it would not be growing so well in our garden.  It has the ability to fix nitrogen itself, a trick shared by other members of its family.  It makes long, wand-like new stems, but is not honestly a very graceful or architectural shrub.  And it grows fast, and wants to grow very large.  When I had a part-time gardening job one summer vacation while I was at Writtle, one of the gardens we tended had an Eleagnus x ebbingei hedge.  The house was fairly new, the garden as small as modern front gardens are, and the hedge can't have been there very long.  I can't believe it's there now.  Within a few years it would have completely filled the garden and covered the front of the house.

Trimming and pruning works up to a point, but the woody structure inside the outer green layer gets inexorably bulkier and more massive.  We don't attempt to use an electric hedge trimmer on ours (which would look awful anyway as the leaves are quite large).  Instead we trace new growths back to a leaf node, and take them out in such a way as to try and promote new growth from inside the plant.  We still get left with old, knobbly ends to the branches, that have been cut back to numerous times, and each time we cut the hedge we lop or saw out some of the most prominent, again trying to stimulate new growth from within.  Eleagnus x ebbingei will break from old wood, but it does so grudgingly, and it's better not to leave large bare patches, as they take a long time to cover themselves.

The appearance immediately after pruning is not very satisfactory, neither crisp and formal nor informal, and it's worse now the hedge is so large that I can't reach the middle of the top from the stepladder, so a rough faced-up front ends in a tufty top of unpruned wands.  I know now that I should have used hornbeam.  It might have taken a few more years to get cover, but after that we would have had a quality barrier that would have outlasted our time in the house.  The poor old Eleagnus never looks entirely smart, even as it filters the wind and blocks the view as required.  The final element of anxiety comes from my realisation, several years after planting the hedge, that it is not reckoned to be a long-live shrub.  Ours has had odd bits of die-back, particularly in the area where there are the remains of the root system of a mature oak (the tree came down in a storm before we bought the house, but the roots remained to make a nuisance of themselves).  Overall, however, it is still looking pretty well.  In fact this autumn it is looking healthier than it has for a while.  I don't know why.  The weather must have suited it.  But one of these days, maybe soon, who knows, one or two of the plants will die, and then I shall be left with a quandary whether to hire a mini-digger, rip out the hedge, and start again with hornbeam as I should have done in the first place.  Which would be very nice once it had grown up, but think of the uncomfortable, exposed years first.