Me? I love hedges. I know of few more satisfying jobs than the production of a perfectly clipped divider between sections of garden, or a beautiful specimen of topiary. It is a cliché to describe it thus, but it is one of those jobs where you can look back on your day's product and really see where you have been. Which is great if you have done it well. Less so if you are rubbish at it.
I used to give masterclasses in hedge maintenance. A few years into the concerted restoration we even hosted a whole team from one of the great English gardens on an evening visit. Their supervisors had brought them to find out how we achieved our results. In the masterclasses, I still had a few myths to debunk.
Visitors would regularly ask me how I achieved such level tops and sides. Do you use strings? Do you use planks? Do you use a spirit-level? they would joke. Do you cut those sharp cones with sheep-shears? Then they would express surprise when they saw me working with the most powerful two-stroke appliance I could find.
I used to take a barrow out with me on these classes, full of all the devices people had suggested over the years. I would also take a bin bag. Over the course of the presentation, everything would end up in the bin bag except my petrol hedgecutters.
Let's start with strings. Over a long length of hedge, if you mark out the line of your cut with string, you will find that the string sags in the middle. You will create a dip in the middle of your hedge. If you are to avoid this, you will have to compensate by eye. If you are going to do that, you may as well do away with the string and do the whole thing by eye. Into the bin bag with the string and canes.
Planks. I don't even know where I would start with planks. How would I fit them up so I could follow their line? Would I have an assistant holding them up for me? And each plank would be shorter than the length of the hedge, so there would be discrepancies where each length started. Getting the top level would be a misery. You'd have to compensate by eye. Plank went in the bag. Well, it didn't fit, but the principle was there.
Spirit level? Haha! Do you really think I would be going along checking every few feet with a measuring device? How much of a pedant do you think I am? The fact is, almost everything in a garden has to be slightly altered from the true. Everything is done by eye, because small fluctuations in the ground or the surroundings visually affect what you create. It may be imperceptible, but when rectified by someone with 'the eye', the improvement is evident. I had said this one day, when just for a laugh I took the spirit level and placed it on top of the nearest hedge. The bubble was spot on, in the centre, and it remained so, wherever I moved the level to. I had cut the whole thing by eye, and yet it also registered perfectly on the measuring apparatus. Not everybody can do that, I know. That's why it is best left to the professionals. Put the level in the bin bag. It won't make you a good hedge-cutter. That's in the blood.
Sheep shears are quaint old-fashioned things, used single-handedly, and give a nice soft cut. But they don't bite in hard. If you use sheep shears, your topiary will grow and grow, and very quickly will become something other than what you envisaged. Sheep shears in the bin bag. Same with ordinary garden shears.
That leaves us with the noisy, smelly machine. And for all its faults, that's all you need. That and a good operator. And an understanding that you don't run it flat along the surface of the hedge, but with the cutter angled towards it slightly. Otherwise you just push the growth in front of the blade and cut nothing. I did trial a recommended battery-operated unit once, to reduce noise and fume pollution, and the hedge looked barely passable afterwards. It wasn't sharp. I immediately went over it again with the two-stroke cutters and took off half an inch that the less powerful tool wasn't capable of removing. Imagine how few years it would take for your hedge to exceed the bounds using one of those?
Now, it's easy to show a hedge looking good by photographing it on its own. Six years into the restoration work, a spring view of the south-eastern quadrant of the orchard showed it looking like this, and it is pretty tidy. Pity about the photographer -
But another picture of the same period still shows the hedges at slightly different heights, so the whole-garden concept is not fully engaged -
Every time I cut them I tried to take those distant hedges down a little harder, while still maintaining a green surface, and gradually they came into line with the lower, thicker hedges around the perimeter. It was a long, slow process. If you're not up for that, then don't become a gardener.
The other thing I was trying to achieve was a razor-sharp definition of the edge where the side of the hedge meets the top. Box in particular, but also many other species used for hedging purposes, will tend to grow upwards even at the sides. This means that when you run your cutters along the sides, you will tend to push the growth in front of the blades, and that top half-inch or so will not cut in as tightly as the rest of it, as there is not so much resistance at the top to press in against. Difficult to describe on paper, but I've also found that a demonstration rarely works either. Most people who try to follow my instruction on this overdo it and carve out a completely new and undesirable chamfer in their hedge. But what you need to do is first cut your top and sides, with the sides ever so slightly wider at the bottom than the top. Then you must go back over the sides creating a slight bevel on the top half-inch where it meets the flat top of the plant. Your bevel must be enough to remove the fluff that had been pushed in front of your blades on the first pass, yet so slight that it doesn't register on the eye as a bevel at all. This is the way to make your hedges look as if they have been cut with knife-edged precision in right-angles. It is an illusion. Cutting at right-angles will only leave an edge with a softer shadow which will not look sharp. It is an art. It is a skill. Most people don't even know to do it at all. But it is the action which will mark the most significant difference between a professional job and the other type. In calligraphy, my wife would refer to this as the 'Secret Curve' - that little tweak given by people in the know, which no one will spot, yet which makes all the difference. And most professionals don't realise it either.
Eight years into the job, they were looking like this, still with slight dips here and there, but tending in the right direction. Overall heights were getting closer, all the hedges were starting to look like part of a unit -
So, how do you achieve this uniformity? There is only one way. You must ignore the rise and fall of the ground, and you must stand back every few feet and look at what you have done. This will involve, on a low hedge like this, getting down to the level of the tops and looking across the whole area, before returning to the task and making your cuts where they need to be for all the hedges to match. Let the low spots grow up, cut the high rises hard. Simple as that. Oh - and you need to develop a love for it, because without that, you'll never stick at it, and will certainly not be any good.
The next picture is a bit blurry, sent to me by a visitor, but it shows a different angle, seven years into the project. The hedge in the foreground is one of the pair which had originally been several inches taller than the rest, and had a number of gaps where plants had died. The result you see here has been achieved solely by consistent pruning. No plants were replaced. And if you look at the climbers on the wall of the house behind, you can see that they have responded well to the new pruning regime I mentioned a while back.
Eight years in and we had this, where the squat yew cones at the front of the area had been allowed to grow up to match the taller, slimmer ones further back -
I'm probably a sad old man with no imagination, but somehow, a view like that pleases me almost as much as many a more fussy, colourful garden feature. That simple juxtaposition of the tightly formal with the loose sward of the autumn bulb meadow behind, awaiting the appearances of the autumn crocuses - that's restful. And for us it also used to signify the approaching end of the open season, and the time when we would have it all to ourselves once more. Bliss.
Footnote - choosing a hedgecutter:
You can't get left-handed hedgecutters. If you buy a single-sided machine, it is always set up for a right-hand lead, trigger finger at the back for the left-hand. Me, I do my steering with the left hand. That's where the precision is. For us left-handers, the only option is the double-sided blade. The double-sided units are always shorter than the single ones. Probably because of weight and balance.
You might think this a bad thing. It's not. The longer the blade you use, the greater any discrepancies which might arise. If you are working on a wide hedge, the tendency is often to dip the far end of the blade slightly downwards. A long blade compounds this mistake by dipping further than a short one. I always recommend using a relatively short blade. When selecting a machine at your local suppliers, balance it loosely from the handle in your hand, without gripping. See where it settles. If it rests with the tip of the blade pointing slightly upwards, then it is right for you. If the tip points down, you probably have too long a blade, and it will always tend to cut on a downward angle. You can always correct an upward tilt, but a downward one can mess up your precision.
Hope that's useful.
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