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That’s as the dormant season of late autumn through winter is the greatest time to plant hedges, particularly if you purchase bare-rooted whips from specialist nurseries.

These young plants shall be less expensive than buying most pot-grown hedging from garden centres, and so they usually wear growth quite quickly within the spring.

They may even become stronger plants than in the event you wait until spring to plant them, because they’ll have spent the winter slowly putting down new roots and establishing themselves, in order that they won’t be as liable to dry weather in the summertime.

If you will have the distance to permit for growth, hedges are frequently a more in-depth bet than fences for borders.

This is because they supply a colorful backdrop, or even evergreen hedges change with the seasons – producing flowers in spring and berries within the winter.

But hedges also create a house for wildlife inclusive of birds, who will eat up snails and slugs for you, or insects, who might actually help to pollinate plants.

And while you are on a windy site hedges are better designed to deal with conditions: fence panels will just blow over or break, while hedges – particularly deciduous ones which have dropped their leaves before winter storms arrive – could be ready to bend with the wind.

They do need more maintenance than fences, though. Evergreen hedges generally grow faster than deciduous so that they will need trimming at least one time a year – preferably twice.

My top evergreen hedge is yew (Taxus baccata) because they grow slowly so don’t should be trimmed as often as others and whenever you do get the shears out they don’t scratch.

For a deciduous hedge i’d choose beech (Fagus sylvatica) since the leaves change to copper inside the autumn but don’t drop off until the top of winter after they are replaced by luscious new leaves.

For a winter-flowering hedge i admire winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum), with its little yellow stars of colour cheering even the foremost dismal day.

For a spring-flowering hedge I don’t think you’re able to beat forsythia (Forsythia x intermedia) since it never allows you to down and for summer-flowering hedges i like Fuchsias – but nothing too flouncy or ridiculously bright.

You can use any shrub to create a hedge, so long as you plant enough of them along your boundary.

Just be certain in the event you dig the opening or trench wherein to plant them you dig in numerous compost and ensure it’s sufficiently big to unfolded the roots to encourage them to explore further instead of go round and round.

Take off any wrapping from the roots and confirm each plant is solely buried as deep as they’ve been before – you need to be ready to detect this from the ridge at the trunk.

Plant your whips or pot-grown hedging about 18ins apart, and if you’d like a truly thick hedge plant a staggered second row.

Fill inside the soil carefully, ensuring the roots are properly covered and never left in an air hole, then water well and mulch with more compost or general fertiliser.

As long as you retain a watch on them over the subsequent year, guaranteeing the soil doesn’t dry out an excessive amount of over the spring and summer, you have to an honest-sized hedge within many years.