Hedges direct the eye around your garden, block off areas of your garden or offer privacy. Hedges or trees that make for good hedges tend to grow reliably and will form a lovely full hedge. They need to be pruned to maintain their shape or to keep them the height you want them.  

Bonus points for topiary enthusiasts, if you’re pruning shapes into your shrubbery, you know just how important pruning is. To keep the shape but pruning has many other benefits besides the aesthetics of it.  

Regular hedge pruning ensures a healthy, happy, and functional hedge. Pruning promotes proper growth and while it may seem a one-dimensional task, removing dead or diseased wood, deadheading and various other elements are also necessary to keep your hedges happy.  

Pruning can be a DIY project if you’re comfortable in your knowledge of your plant’s needs, when to prune them and how brutally to hack them back to encourage maximal growth, otherwise you can hire professionals to prune your hedges.  

Here are a few benefits of professional hedge pruning: 

• Improved Plant Health  

The pruning process involves removing dead or diseased wood which helps the plant’s health.  Diseased wood needs to be removed to prevent the spread of disease and damage to the rest of the plant and other plants. Cutting back deadwood improves the likelihood of new growth too.   

• Encourages New Growth 

Pruning your plants using proper pruning techniques stimulates new and abundant growth, which on hedges is what you want. Pruning allows you to create denser, bushier sections so you can control how your hedge is shaped. Removing weak or unhealthy parts of the plant makes it more resistant to pests and environmental stress as well as dramatically reduces the chances of disease, structural weakness and branch failure as the plant matures 

• Enhanced Aesthetics 

 They need to be pruned based on how fast they grow. It’s important to keep your long-term goal in mind when you’re pruning them too, for example, remember to remove soft young bottom branches if you’d eventually like them to be lollipop shaped. Regular pruning helps ensure a neat and orderly appearance. 

• Functional Advantages 

Hedges are fantastic privacy screens, and windbreaks and can impact airflow and sunlight. Pruning ensures that you get what you want and maintain that. A privacy screen needs to be neat and well-maintained as that’s what your neighbours will see, and it needs to be thick enough to block them from seeing you.  

For windbreaks, you’ll want to let them grow quite tall and thick, both of which will happen if you prune them correctly. Pruning them to make them dense and grow upward instead of outward will help create a good windbreak.  

Strategic pruning is necessary to impact the airflow and sunlight penetration. Tall thick windbreak-style hedges will work well to block the wind but will also block sunlight, so if you want hedges and sunlight to grow flowers, you need to be creative with your hedges. 

Luckily, we’re here to help! For expert advice on professional hedge pruning, Ecological Tree Services is here to help. Feel free to give our office a call on 07 3520 8661 if you have any questions.   

-Alex the Arborist