Pleached hedges for screening – Grow your own

Pleached Hedging: A Stylish and Cost-Effective Screening Solution

Pleached hedges are a wonderful way to add structure and privacy to your garden. This technique involves growing trees on long, straight stems and training the branches across a frame, creating a high, elegant screen or feature, such as a walkway or boundary. Pleached hedges can offer a green alternative to fencing, blending aesthetics and functionality in any outdoor space.

Why Pleached Hedges?

In modern neighbourhoods where houses are often built closer together, privacy can be a real concern. If you’re tired of being overlooked by neighbours, pleached hedging offers an attractive, natural solution. Not only does it create a screen that blocks sightlines, but it also enhances the visual appeal of your garden with its structured, formal look.

The Cost of Instant Pleached Hedges

While you can purchase fully trained pleached hedge plants from specialist suppliers, the price is often prohibitive. Each plant can cost anywhere from £200 to £600, depending on its maturity and the species. For a large garden, this cost can quickly escalate into the thousands.

The GardenAdvice Solution: DIY Pleached Hedging

To help our clients achieve the same stylish effect without the hefty price tag, GardenAdvice recommends a more economical approach. We suggest purchasing slightly untrained bare root trees in autumn or winter. These untrained plants typically cost between £20 to £60 each, depending on size, and can be trained onto a custom-built pleaching frame in your garden.

This DIY method might take a bit longer, as the trees will need time to grow and fill out the frame, but it can save you hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds. Plus, there’s the added satisfaction of watching your hedge grow and evolve over time.

Ideal Trees for Pleached Hedging

A variety of trees can be trained into pleached hedges, allowing you to choose the species that best suits your garden’s aesthetic. Some popular options include:

• Lime trees (Tilia spp.) – Known for their dense foliage and ability to create a uniform, full screen.
• Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) – A classic choice for pleaching, offering robust growth and beautiful autumn colour.
• Apple (Malus spp.) and Pear (Pyrus spp.) trees – Fruit-bearing trees that provide both screening and seasonal fruit.
• Cotoneaster cornubia – An evergreen option with clusters of red berries in autumn.
• Acer campestre (Field Maple) – A hardy, native species with attractive foliage that turns golden in autumn.

Creating Your Pleaching Frame

The pleached frame is key to training your trees into the desired shape. A simple but sturdy frame can be made using wooden posts or scaffolding poles, with horizontal wires strung between them. These wires act as the guide for the tree branches, which are gradually tied and trained to follow the frame as they grow.

Frames should be strong enough to support the weight of the growing trees and should be positioned to allow airflow and light to reach the plants. Depending on the tree species, regular pruning will be necessary to maintain the shape and encourage dense growth along the framework.

Additional Considerations

When planning your pleached hedge, it’s essential to consider spacing and future maintenance. Trees should be planted with enough space to allow for their root systems to expand, typically around 1 to 2 metres apart, depending on the species. Regular pruning and training are necessary, particularly in the early years, to achieve the desired shape and density.

Using bare root trees also has the added benefit of being more environmentally friendly, as they are often less resource-intensive to produce and transport compared to container-grown trees.

Pleached hedging is an elegant and practical solution for those looking to increase privacy or add structure to their gardens. While the cost of fully trained plants can be high, with a little patience and effort, you can achieve the same result for a fraction of the price. By choosing the right trees and following the pleaching method, you’ll have a beautiful, natural screen that enhances your garden for years to come.

GardenAdvice is here to help guide you through the process, offering tips and tricks for training your trees, building your pleaching frame, and ensuring your hedge thrives.