Wild Privet Hedge Plants

Ligustrum vulgare Hedging

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Ligustrum vulgare, the wild privet, is a large native shrub that makes a great country hedging plant.

It's the only semi-evergreen in our range of privet hedge plants, losing its leaves in mid-to-late winter, depending on where you are in the country. In sunny Cornwall, it's pretty much evergreen.

This hardy, shade-tolerant bush is often planted to provide cover, while its berries are valuable food for all kinds of wildlife, including game. It's also the main food source of the privet hawk moth, Britain's largest native moth.

Like other members of the privet family, wild privet is poisonous to livestock.

It'll perform well in any averagely fertile soil, even in dry or quite damp places, where it's better than green privet. It's a natural choice for coastal hedging.

Garden Design Ideas

Wild privet has an average growth rate of 20-40cm a year, and it's ideal for a rural site, whereas the evergreen Japanese privets are better suited to towns and cities.

It's often planted as a mixed native hedge, where species such hawthorn and guelder rose will add to the berry and flower bonanza, attracting even more beneficial wildlife.

History & Trivia

Wild privet is found all over Europe, parts of North Africa and eastwards as far as Iraq.

It's always been part of country hedges, and was used extensively as garden hedging since Elizabethan times, before it was almost entirely replaced by green privet, which was introduced from Japan in the 1880s.