We’ve just bought a property with a long hedge of Ligustrum vulgare (wild privet), planted in the mid-90s and apparently left unmaintained for about ten years. Some sections still have leaves, but many are quite bare. A few shrubs even have a grey-green lichen growing on them. I’ve watched several online tutorials on pruning privet, but none of the examples are as bad as this.
Should we prune it back hard to encourage new shoots? Or coppice it right down to the ground to let it regenerate? Or is it a lost cause? Thank you for your advice.
by Dress-Virtual
7 Comments
A very hard prune.
As it’s very hard to destroy a privet hedge I would say yes, it is salvageable.
It just needs a very brutal hair cut. Next spring it will soon spring into life, sending up new green shoots.
Privet is one of those plants that doesn’t die even when you want it to die. I’d coppice it and if it survives then great if not then great can use a hedging with more biological value.
They can take a fair bit of punishment so there’s a reasonable chance it’ll be okay.
I’d recommend not going in and pruning it all at once so it has a better chance of recovering.
E.g Do the front this year and the back next year – but if you’d rather do it all at once, you can. It’ll just be tougher on it to regrow. After chopping it, water it and add some nice compost to help it along.
Late winter is a good time to do it as you want to be sure you don’t disturb any nesting birds etc.
And if you have lots of leaf and wood piles that are left outside, when you clear them later there aren’t any hedgehogs or other friends hiding on there especially if you burn or chip it.
L. vulgare has a very different growth habit to L. ovalifolium. Don’t follow advice relevant to the latter and expect the same result.
Can be happily hard pruned, but L. vulgare naturally scrambles through other shrubby plants, somewhere between a lax shrub and a scrambling climber. Not ideal for a hedge on its own as it doesn’t really have the structural integrity to hold itself up and will naturally be fairly wide spreading and prone to collapse. A series of posts an wires will give some structure, or interplant a more structurally sound shrub species – yew, holly, guelder rose, hornbeam, spindle, alder buckthorn – depending on your soil conditions.
Hack it back to where you want it. It then has 2 options – grow or curl its toes.
I cut back a privet hedge this year. I took over a meter off one side. Did it July and it is comming back but I think it will take another couple of seasons for it to blend in. I would leave cutting it to the spring (before nesting season). The advice I’ve had is to cutback one face (side/top) a year. So trim it over 3 years.
I used a long piece of wood to try to get a straight line vertically and tried to leave it slightly wider at the base.