Fagus sylvatica

Green Beech Hedge Plants

Green Beech, Fagus sylvatica, vies with yew to be Britain's the most popular garden hedge plant. Beech hedges hold onto their summer foliage right through the winter and they give gentle variety as a backdrop changing from light bright green in spring to dark green in late summer and then a golden brown as they die but stay until March. By clipping a mature beech hedge in midsummer, you will help it to hold onto its autumn leaves during winter, which gives you the seasonal interest of a deciduous hedge with the privacy of an evergreen one. Mature beech hedges can become very wide, which improves their ability to slow down the wind and muffle sound from a busy road. Beech hedging is suitable for any well drained soil and can be grown as a hedge of any height from 1m upwards. You can see our full range of Beech Hedging here.

You can buy a wide range of plants on this page, obviously the larger ones make more impact when planted but they are all suitable for planting as hedging.

Your plants are delivered bareroot during winter (Nov-April). All our hedge plants are measured by their height in centimetres above the ground (the roots aren't measured).

You can buy the larger sizes of bareroot beech in discounted packs of 50 plants while you can buy larger Green Beech trees here and copper beech plants here.

Spacing a Green Beech hedge:
Plant at 3 plants per metre (33cms apart). Unless you want an especially think hedge or it is to be stockproof, one row is sufficient. If you want two rows, then plant at 5 per metre with the rows 45cms apart.

History & uses of Fagus sylvatica
The highest beech hedge (100 feet tall) is in Scotland, at Meikleour. Mature beech trees produce small nuts, called mast, which are a good feed for pigs and deer but not horses. They are edible to humans, but they taste bitter. The oil of mast was used for cooking and lamps. Beech timber is used for indoor furniture and makes very good firewood, which can be used to smoke food. The largest beech tree on record was 46 metres tall. Beech is a pan-European tree that probably came to British shores about 5,500 years ago. As such it is considered to be native to Britain. It was probably brought here by stone age humans, after the Channel had formed and cut Britain off from the mainland. Native or not, Beech woodland covers about 80,000 hectares of Great Britain.