Can you advise me as to what would be the best choice of hedging for my country garden? The soil is a heavy, damp clay while winter frosts are also not uncommon. J Clarke, Co Kilkenny
You’re absolutely right to think very carefully about the most suitable species of hedging for your garden, whose growing conditions would be challenging for some, resulting in poor growth and making them vulnerable to disease. Beech hedging, for example, dislikes a heavy clay soil, which is also often naturally inclined to winter wet, as does yew, box, lavender, teucrium, photinia and the shrubby rugosa rose. So do some native hedging species such as the spindle bush, Euonymus europaeus.
Other species, however, can tolerate or even like it but you’ll still need to concentrate on those that are reliably hardy in your colder inland garden. Suitable deciduous examples include hornbeam, berberis, flowering curran), spiraea, hazel, hawthorn, field maple, blackthorn, Viburnum opulus, willow and alder. Suitably hardy, reliably evergreen species include Portuguese laurel, Viburnum tinus and holly.
Other factors to weigh up when choosing a hedge include its eventual size, style (formal or informal, native or non-native, flowering or nonflowering, mixed or just one species) and its rate of growth/maintenance requirements as well as your soil’s pH. Bear in mind that hedges that incorporate a mix of species aren’t suitable for use as very formal clipped hedges. Neither are flowering hedges.
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Finally, also bear in mind that your garden’s heavy clay soil can always be improved by incorporating plenty of coarse horticultural grit and even some fine pebble into the planting holes along with some well-rotted manure. If the ground is very prone to winter wet, then consider gently banking or mounding up the soil before planting to help protect the hedge’s root system from sitting in wet ground. Rather than winter cold, it’s the latter that’s so often the cause of plant death in Irish gardens.
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