Beech Hedge Plants & Sapling Trees
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We take great care in delivering healthy trees to your doorstep. Each order is hand-picked, carefully packaged, and shipped using trusted couriers to ensure safe arrival.
All trees are shipped in eco-friendly recyclable packaging. Roots are securely wrapped to retain moisture during transit, keeping your tree healthy and ready for planting.
We currently deliver across the UK mainland. Unfortunately, we cannot deliver to Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, or the Channel Islands due to plant health regulations.
Once your order has been dispatched, you will receive a tracking link by email so you can follow your tree’s journey from our nursery to your garden.
If you require delivery on a specific date (e.g., birthday gift, landscaping project), please add a note at checkout and we’ll do our best to accommodate.
Beech Hedge Plants & Sapling Trees
Delivered Direct from Our Nursery
Buy Potted Beech Hedging & Instant Trou...
Beech Hedge Plants & Sapling Trees
Delivered Direct from Our Nursery
Buy Potted Beech Hedging & Instant Troughs Now For September Delivery
Pre-Order Bareroot Beech Plants For 2025/26 Winter Planting Season
Beech, Fagus sylvatica, is one of the best loved formal garden hedging plants in the UK, and it also makes a wonderful stock proof, livestock friendly hedge for enclosing stables and studs, often planted on top of bunds and traditional Devon banks.
It is not evergreen, but a clipped beech hedge will hold onto its Autumn leaves through most of the winter, giving you privacy and interest almost year round.
Copper / Purple Beech is more dramatic, a bit more expensive and probably adds more value.Green Beech is an easier backdrop for most flower beds, and so more versatile.
• Uses: Formal and stock-friendly hedges from 100cm upwards.
• Good Points: Native, holds leaves in winter, clips beautifully.
• Position: Anywhere with good drainage and light.
We also sell Green & Purple Beech trees in standard sizes.
The planting density for your Beech hedge depends on the purpose:
Smaller plants are cheaper, easier to plant, and tend to establish better because they are dug up with most of their roots intact.You can also clip them attentively and ensure a very bushy plant from the base up.
If you still aren't sure, then 60/80cm tall is considered the ideal compromise between price, size, and waiting time until you get a mature hedge.
Your mail order beech hedge plants are delivered by next working day courier.If there is anything wrong with your plants when they arrive, Contact Us within 5 working days, and our friendly support team will sort it out.
All bareroot plants are covered by our Refund Guarantee, so you can give them a whirl with complete confidence.
Purple (AKA copper) Beech is the same as Green Beech in all respects apart from the leaf colour.
Purple Beech leaves actually start off mostly green in Spring, although a good bit darker green than Green Beech, maturing through a range of winey-maroon colours to luxurious deep purple, turning marmalade orange in Autumn.
Green Beech leaves emerge bright green in Spring, which look divine with the sunlight filtering through them. They mature to a glossy mid-green in Summer, followed by a vibrant coppery-yellow colour in the Autumn, a touch brighter than Purple Beech.
Both varieties will hold their Autumn foliage (which is brown by this point) through most of the Winter, provided that they were clipped at least once during summer.
Green Beech, Fagus sylvatica, and Hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, are unrelated but similar looking when grown as a hedge. Basically, Beech is best, but if it's not suitable for your location, Hornbeam is a pretty close substitute.
If there are puddles of rainwater where you are going to plant your hedge 12-24 hours after heavy rain, the ground is probably too wet for beech.
You can grow a Beech hedge in any well drained soil, including chalk, poor soils, and heavy clay as long as it is not waterlogged in Winter.It does need a decent amount of sun: light shade is fine, but it won't thrive in less than half a day of full sun.
Beech is very hardy and wind-resistant, but not suitable for the coast.
For shady and/or damp conditions, we recommend Hornbeam hedging as the closest substitute.
Beech plants are moderately vigorous, growing at 30-60cm per year, depending on your location (plants generally grow faster in the warmer South & West than in the cooler East & North of Great Britain) and your local conditions (wind-shelter and full sun are ideal).
However, as with any hedge, you must trim it to get lots of dense, bushy growth down to the base. So, there is a balance to be struck: aim for about 20cm of growth after trimming in the first few years.
Bear in mind that it is common for most plants to put on very little height in their first year after being transplanted into your garden.There is nothing wrong with this: they are laying down roots first, in readiness for growing upwards and filling out.
A beech hedge can be maintained from about 1 metre up to as tall as you like: the tallest beech hedge in the world is 30 metres tall.
You can plant beech hedging at any time of year, except when the soil is frozen.
The best time to plant beech is in winter (November to March), using bareroot stock, which is cheaper, easier to carry and plant, and tends to establish even better than the pot grown equivalents.
Beech and Hornbeam look better in late Winter as a staggered double row: 50cm between plants along each row, so 4 plants per metre in total.
But a normal single row at 3 plants per metre is fine, especially when the hedge will be allowed to grow reasonably wide, at least 150cm at the base.
In some counties, Beech is used on farms as a livestock proof hedge, planted like other country hedging in a double row: two single rows in parallel, 40cm apart. Stagger the rows by starting one 16.5cm after the first.
To plant a beech hedge using bareroot plants up to 80cm tall or less, follow the slit planting instructions in our country hedge planting video with one difference: do not cut the plants in half as you would with country hedging. Only snip off the tips - the top inch is plenty.
You will need spiral guards and canes to support them if you have rabbits around.The mypex weed suppression fabric is optional, and really not necessary in most garden.
To plant a beech hedge using potted plants, or bareroot plants over 80cm tall, follow the trench planting instructions in our formal hedge planting video.
We always recommend using Rootgrow friendly fungi, especially if your soil is poor.
Water well after planting, and consistently during the first summer. A porous hose will make the job easier.
Keep the ground under your new hedge clear of weeds.
Remember: the two biggest causes of new hedges failing are drying out, and/or being choked by weeds.
The biggest question everyone has is: when do I cut my mature beech hedge to make it hold its Autumn leaves through Winter?
The answer is between late July and early September: anytime in August is best. Read more below.
New beech hedges only need very light trimming.
You may lightly trim your plants immediately after planting, nipping the leading leaf buds on top of every stem, but you don't need to. Pruning back straggling, untidy stems is enough.
Year 1: While your beech hedge is still establishing, it's best to trim it in winter. One light cut, just nipping off the ends of the new growth is all it needs.
Year 2: Now the hedge is really established, it should grow faster: you might give it a light clip in midsummer, and another in winter.
After two years of formative clipping, a regularly trimmed beech hedge, clipped lightly twice a year, will remain lush for decades.
You can trim your hedge at any time without harming it, but for the best foliage display, trim twice a year, with an optional third trim:
The ideal hedge profile is slightly tapered, like / \ but with less steep sides, so that light can reach the lowest branches.If your hedge runs east-west, its south facing side gets full sun and could be vertical, like this: | \
By trimming your new beech hedge plants early and often, you force them to branch out.The more side branches there are, the more leaves you get, and the nicer your hedge looks.
If you don't trim your beech hedging, it will turn into a row of beech trees!
When you plant trees close together, they naturally compete for light by growing straight up. Compare a beech tree in a dense wood to one standing alone in a park:
By clipping the hedge, we maintain dense growth with lots of leaves down to the ground, with a shape that allows light to the lowest branches.
An overgrown or sparse old beech hedge that needs serious remedial pruning is best done in winter, when the plants are dormant, spread over 2 or 3 years.
Note that being so cautious is for best results, to ensure strong regrowth, and to prevent you from looking at a mostly bald hedge for a year!
If you were to do all the pruning described below in one winter, the hedge should be fine, especially with watering the following summer (a severe prune followed by a dry summer could be too much stress).
The summer before cutting it back, it is good to mulch your hedge well, and clip it as normal. Water well in dry spring and summer weather following a severe pruning.