Hedging Plants

Hedge Plants and Sapling Trees

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Pre-Order Bareroot Plants For 2025/26 Winter Planting Season

You can buy all the native hedge plants, sapling trees, and a wide range of ornamental varieties from us.

Hedging plants are cheaper, longer lasting, and much easier to install than a fence.

Hedgerows provide privacy and structure to your garden, protection from the elements, a habitat for wildlife, and an ornamental framing of foliage and flowers for your lawns and flower beds.

What is so good about bareroot hedging?

The majority of UK hedging is planted bareroot. For many, buying plants with no soil around the roots sounds wrong, but the strong field grown stock transplants so well because they're sleeping in winter, minimising stress.

While out of the ground, plants are kept in ideal cold, humid conditions until picked, quality-checked, and sent by next-day delivery.

Bareroot hedge plants are, compared to pot grown equivalents:

• Cheaper
• Faster growing & better establishing
• Weigh much less = easier to handle and plant
• More eco-friendly, plastic free cultivation
• Wider selection available
• Only delivered November-March

Some plants or larger sizes only come in pots. Some popular species are sold bareroot in winter and potted the rest of the year.

Where you have a choice, bareroot is better.

To add interest to a new hedge or woodland, you cannot beat a range of garden bulbs.

Our healthy, high-quality stock is grown well, lifted regularly so it spends the least time in transit, double-checked for quality, and kept in proper cold-store facilities before packing.

• When your order is ready: your mail order hedge plants are delivered by next working day courier (not the next working day after ordering!)
• Friendly support: if there is anything wrong with your plants when you inspect them, Contact Us within 5 working days

All bareroot plants are covered by our Refund Guarantee, so you can give them a whirl with complete confidence.

What are the cheapest hedge plants?

Bareroot is always cheaper than pot grown. Small sizes are obviously cheaper than large, and tend to perform even better.

Top 4 cheapest deciduous hedge plants:

• Hawthorn
• Blackthorn
• Hornbeam
• Green Beech

Top 4 cheapest evergreen hedge plants:

• Lawson's Cypress
• Green Privet
• Norway Spruce
• Cherry Laurel

For larger projects, mixed hedge packs offer the best value per plant.

Choosing Which Size Hedge Plants to Order

Many hedge plants are delivered in sizes ranging from little 40/60cm tall unbranched 'whips', up to almost two metre, bushy specimens for the most popular species.

• If you are in a hurry for privacy and need instant impact, then of course pick the biggest size that fits your budget.
• If you are filling gaps in an existing hedge, large size replacements are usually better, but small plants are easier to slide into soil full of roots. Inspect the ground well and test getting a spade or pickaxe down along it.

Smaller plants have several advantages

• Cheaper
• Easier to plant
• Establish well because they are dug up with most of their roots intact
• Need less water in their first summer (but watering is still essential in dry weather)
• Can be clipped attentively to ensure a bushy base & dense growth

So Which Size Hedging Should I Order?

• Farmers and other large scale hedge or forestry projects prefer plants 40/60cm tall: it's the minimum required size for Countryside Stewardship hedging, and has the best success rate in field conditions. Conifers for forestry typically have to be sold a bit smaller, e.g. 20/40cm tall for a Sitka Spruce.
• Many home gardeners choose 60/80cm tall as a great compromise between price, size, and waiting time until you get a mature hedge.
• Plants over 80cm tall are good for creating privacy ASAP, filling gaps in mature hedges, and when they suit your budget. Remember, big plants need more water in their first year to thrive. Rootballed Yew is the biggest hedging we deliver, along with Instant Hedge Troughs.

Choose the Best Hedging for Me

By default, people plant evergreen hedges or beech around their homes for privacy and year round interest, and rugged, deciduous native plants everywhere else.

Most popular hedge plants lists:

• Formal & Garden Fast Evergreens For Privacy 
• Thorny Plants For Security
• Native Country & Farm Countryside Stewardship - Best value for grants 
• Horse & Livestock Friendly

More Useful Hedge Plant Lists:

• All Evergreen hedge plants
• Drought / Dry Soil Tolerant Hedges
• Hedges For Shade
• Plants For Low Hedges & Border Edging
• Hedge Plants For Bees & Pollinators
• Coastal Seaside Salt Tolerant
• Prettiest flowers: all seasons hedge mix
• Plants For Covering Fences & Walls

What plants can't I use in a hedge?

Trees like Birch, Oak, Sycamore, Rowan, and Wild Cherries are sold as hedge-sized saplings because they're planted in country hedges to grow as trees above the hedge line, not clipped with it.

On their own they produce unsatisfying hedges, especially in winter when bare branches provide little screening. Surrounded by solid hedge plants like Hawthorn and Blackthorn, they look fine.

If growing mixed native hedging with hedgerow trees, use tree guards so their tops aren't trimmed with the hedge.

Hedging With Berries: provide extra interest & wildlife value, and several soft fruit bushes can be grown as / inside hedges as a treat beside a gate.

When and how do I plant hedging?

Bareroot: November to March. Pot grown: any time except frozen soil.

See our step-by-step guides:

• Slit planting vs trench planting
• How to plant a country hedge (video)
• How to plant a formal hedge (video)

How many hedge plants per metre?

Standard spacing for most hedging:

• Single row boundary hedge: 3 plants per metre (33cm apart)
• Double row stockproof: 6 plants per metre, rows 45cm apart
• Formal hedges: 3 per metre (boundary), 2 per metre (interior)
• Box edging: 5 plants per metre (20cm apart)

For detailed spacing by plant type and purpose, see our complete hedge spacing guide.

Aftercare

All Hedges:

1. Water when it is dry: new hedges are on "water life support" for their first summer at least. We recommend an irrigation system like a leaky pipe. Otherwise, soak the soil around your plants twice a week in dry weather.
2. Hoe down weeds and grass for about 75cm on either side of your hedge; hand-pull weeds that grow out from under mulch fabric right next to your plants.
3. Firm the soil back down after a frost, or if your plants are pushed around by the wind: put up a temporary windbreak if necessary.
4. Check the hedge to remove and record losses; replace them in one go next planting season. Do not be concerned if evergreens drop their leaves.
5. Mulch yearly, when the soil is moist and warm.

Weeds kill hedging, more than rabbits in most gardens. Mulches suppress weeds and preserve soil moisture, which gives an astonishing boost to your hedge's growth rate!

• Organic mulches are best for garden hedging, including grass clippings, compost, woodchips, cardboard, carpet felt, only don't pile it up around the trunks of your new plants.

• One application of weed control fabric, woven plastic mulch, lasts for years.

Hedge Trimming is the key to dense, bushy foliage.

Developing hedges are best cut in autumn, winter, or very early spring, any time the weather is not freezing. A mature hedge can be trimmed any time.

Cut mixed country hedging back to 6-8inches (15-20cm) immediately after planting, this creates several low side shoots when it starts to grow in Spring: the base of a bushy hedge.

• Reduce those new shoots by 50% in the autumn/winter following planting.
• Trim gently every winter thereafter, until desired height is reached.
• One rough cut per year is all mature hedges need. Aim to leave 2-3cm of growth from the previous year.

Hedgerow trees like Ash, Oak, or Silver Birch are planted in the same way as a hedging plant, but only their lowest branches are pruned off, to encourage a single trunk. A short tree shelter is convenient, so their tops aren't trimmed with the rest of the hedge.

Hedge Laying is used to regenerate old country hedges. Well-planted hedging is stock-proof in about 5 years and, if trimmed every 1-2 years, it should be over 50 years before it first needs laying. If you want to lay your hedge for the practice, you could do so from the 5th year onwards.

Trim formal hedging only lightly; do not trim the leading stem of Yew at all until it reaches the desired height. With small beech plants, you can pinch out the last leaf buds at the tips of each stems by hand.

• To look their best, mature formal hedges like Beech and Privet require clipping twice a year; slow growers like Box and Yew are fine with one.

What is the difference between an ornamental shrub, a hedge plant, and a sapling tree?

Mainly their intended use!

Most hedge plants are sapling trees (the rest are naturally bushes/shrubs), sold at the ideal starting sizes for hedge use.

If you plant, say, a beech hedge plant and leave it to grow naturally, it will become a normal beech tree, not a hedge.

• All the young trees listed as suitable 'hedge plants' are also used for forestry planting.
• Only the trees listed as 'sapling trees' are not really suitable for clipped hedge plants (such as Oak or Sycamore: it's not that you can't possibly make a hedge with them, it's more that the final result will look unsatisfactory, especially in winter with no leaves), although most of them are good for taller screening - all such exceptions will be clearly noted in the product description.

Many of the sapling trees sold for hedging in this section are also delivered in large standard sizes, which are the same tree, just grown with a straight, unforked stem.

• Hedging plants (listed on this page) are mostly delivered bareroot, and used to make a secure, functional barrier hedge.
• They are clipped / trimmed at least once or twice a year in order to maintain bushy, leafy growth.
• Ornamental garden shrubs are mostly pot-grown and primarily intended for border specimens, and for ornamental, rather than barrier hedging (or low edging around paths and borders).
• They are generally pruned once a year at most, in order to encourage more flowering the following year, but many of them only need pruning when they are getting too big.

Naturally, there is plenty of overlap: a plant's use in your garden is up to you!

For example, the classic formal evergreen plant for low hedges and topiary, Box, given enough time, could be grown as a tall hedge, and over many decades a tall tree.

Dogwoods are an example of where the wild species, Cornus alba and Cornus sanguinea, are used for practical country hedging, usually mixed with other natives like Hawthorn. Their colourful cultivars like Cornus 'Midwinter Fire' or C. 'Westonbirt' are typically hard pruned down to a stump every Spring for their display of brightly coloured new shoots. However, if you want to jazz up your regular hedge with those bright bark cultivars, or hard prune the wild species as a border specimen for a natural look, that's your call. If you don't like how it looks, we'll be here for you when you want to change it.