How to Lay a Hedge: The UK Craft of Hedgelaying

There is a particular kind of hedge you see all over Britain in late winter: a low, dense, freshly woven line of stems bent over at an angle, pinned down with pale new stakes, with a neat plaited binder running along the top. It looks almost too tidy to be natural, because it is not natural at all. It is hedgelaying, one of the oldest hands-on skills in the countryside, and it is how a tired, gappy, overgrown old hedge is turned back into a thick living wall that will keep stock in and shelter wildlife for a generation.

The idea is beautifully simple. Left alone, any hedge grows up rather than out: the base thins, gaps open at ground level, and after a few decades you no longer have a hedge but a straggly row of small trees with daylight underneath. Laying reverses that. You part-cut the main stems low down and lay them over, still alive, so they knit into a barrier and burst into fresh growth from the bottom. The National Hedgelaying Society puts the payoff plainly: hedgelaying is the only management method that promotes regrowth from ground level, and once a hedge has been laid, regular trimming will keep it in good order for up to 50 years before it may be worth laying again.

This guide walks through why and when to lay, the main regional styles, the core method step by step, the tools, and the safety and legal points that genuinely matter. It pairs naturally with our guides to stock fencing, to coppicing for firewood, which shares much of the same billhook-and-chainsaw skill set, and to tree and hedgerow law, which you should read before you cut anything on an old boundary.

Why lay a hedge

A well laid hedge does several jobs at once, which is why the craft has survived. It is a living, stock-proof barrier: where a wire fence just holds animals back, a thick laid hedge stops cattle leaning through and sheep pushing out at the base, while also sheltering them from wind and rain. It is far richer for wildlife than any fence, offering nesting cover, berries and a green corridor across the landscape. And it is heritage: those tidy woven lines are a visible thread of rural skill running back centuries. A hedge is best laid while still relatively young, ideally within its first ten years, and once laid and trimmed it holds good for decades, so laying is an occasional deep reset rather than endless labour.

When to lay: the winter season and the law

Hedgelaying is winter work. You lay when the hedge is dormant, the sap is down and the leaves are off, traditionally through the quiet cold months from roughly late autumn to the end of winter. Dormant stems bend and heal far better than growing ones. Avoid laying during hard frosts, though, because frozen wood is brittle, the cuts tear rather than slice, and the pleachers are more likely to snap.

The other end of the season is set by law, not preference. The bird nesting season runs from 1 March to 31 August, and under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 it is an offence to damage or destroy an active nest at any time. On top of that, there are rules restricting the cutting and trimming of many farm hedges across those same spring and summer dates. The practical upshot is that you aim to have your laying finished before spring gets going. Do not treat "outside the ban dates" as a green light either: if there is an active nest in a hedge, it is protected whatever the calendar says.

Wildlife is also the reason not to lay everything at once. Laying a stretch strips it of most of its cover in a single go, so the widely repeated guidance is to lay only a small proportion of your total hedge length in any one winter, often given as no more than about 5 per cent. Work along the same hedge a section a year and you always keep mature cover standing somewhere.

The regional styles

One of the loveliest things about hedgelaying is that it is not one method but many. Styles evolved locally to suit the stock, the land and the materials, and the National Hedgelaying Society recognises a large number of them, well over thirty by some counts. You do not need to master them all; you pick the one that suits your area and your hedge. A few of the best known give the flavour of the range.

The differences are partly practical, in how the stakes are set and the stock they must hold, and partly the signature of a region or even a single estate. If you are learning, find out what the local style is and follow it; the method below is the common backbone that runs through most of them.

The method, step by step

How to lay a hedge

1. 1

   Clear and assess

   Work along the hedge clearing out dead wood, brambles, old wire and any growth badly out of line. Watch for buried fencing wire, which a billhook can bounce off dangerously. Decide which stems will become pleachers and which will be cut right out; where you have a choice, keep the younger stems, because they regrow more strongly.

2. 2

   Trim the working side

   Trim the excess brush off the side of the hedge you are working from, cutting back to the line of the hedge, so you can see the stems and get a clean swing at the base. In a single-brush style you take the brush off one side; in a double-brush style you leave more on.

3. 3

   Cut the pleacher

   This is the key cut. Low on the stem, around 3cm to 10cm above the ground, cut in at an angle. Go far enough that the stem will lower into place without forcing, but deliberately leave a tongue of living wood, the cambium and sapwood, uncut on the underside. That living hinge keeps the pleacher alive.

4. 4

   Lay the pleacher

   Bend the part-cut stem over and lay it down along the line of the hedge, all pleachers to the same angle according to your chosen style. Where the ground slopes, lay uphill: this helps the sap keep flowing up into the laid stem. Make sure each pleacher is not tangled in the standing hedge as it goes down.

5. 5

   Drive the stakes

   As you go, drive stakes (around 4cm across) into the line of the hedge to hold the pleachers, spaced to suit your style, typically somewhere around 40cm to 50cm apart. Knock each stake about 50cm into the ground, leaving roughly 10cm proud of the finished top. Weave the brushy tops of the pleachers in between the stakes as you lay.

6. 6

   Bind or heather the top

   Along the top, weave long flexible binders in and out of the stakes to lock everything together and strengthen the new hedge. Binders about 3m long and 25mm thick work well; hazel is best, with sweet chestnut, elm or willow as alternatives. Not every style is bound, but most are.

7. 7

   Trim and tidy

   Cut the tops off the stakes, trim off the spriggy bits sticking out, and even up the overall shape into the profile your style calls for. Burn the trimmings on a small, well-managed fire kept clear of the hedge, or stack them as habitat, and make sure any fire is fully out before you leave.

Done well, the result looks almost impossibly neat, and on a good Midland-style hedge the far side barely shows that anything drastic has happened at all. Come spring, fresh shoots break from the laid pleachers and the cut stools, and within a season or two the base thickens into that dense, living, stock-proof wall.

Tools and kit

The billhook is the star of the craft: a heavy, curved single-handed blade used for cutting pleachers, trimming brush and pointing stakes. Regional billhook patterns are part of the tradition. Alongside it you want a bowsaw or loppers for cleaner cuts on bigger wood, a stout mallet or maul to drive the stakes, good gloves and eye protection. Keep the billhook genuinely sharp: a sharp blade cuts cleanly and is safer than a blunt one you have to force.

For thicker, older stems, a chainsaw makes short work of the pleaching cut and is now widely used, but it changes the risk level entirely. See our coppicing guide for more on working safely with a saw among awkward, springy stems.

Aftercare

A freshly laid hedge is fragile until it re-roots and re-shoots, so protect it. Keep livestock off the new work for a year or two while the base thickens; in styles built on banks, cattle and sheep can knock a new lay apart before it establishes. The stakes and binders are not permanent; they do their job for a couple of seasons and then rot down into the hedge, by which time the pleachers and stools have grown together into a self-supporting barrier. After that, upkeep is light: an occasional trim to hold the shape and stop the hedge bolting upward again is all it takes to carry a well laid hedge through the decades until it is due to be laid once more.

Common mistakes

• Cutting the pleacher right through, so it dies or breaks off, instead of leaving a living hinge of sapwood.
• Laying downhill, which works against the sap flow; lay uphill wherever the ground slopes.
• Laying in hard frost, when brittle wood tears and snaps rather than bending cleanly.
• Laying too much hedge in one winter and stripping wildlife of cover; keep to a modest proportion each year.
• Working with a blunt billhook, which forces the cut and is more dangerous, not less.
• Reaching for a chainsaw without training or PPE on stems that are under tension.
• Ignoring the calendar and the law: straying into the nesting season, or reworking an old hedge that is legally protected.
• Leaving new work open to stock, so animals wreck the lay before it has rooted.

A note on the kit