The effectiveness of hedge laying

I thought this might be of interest to anyone with an old hedge that needs rejuvenating…

Ten years ago we moved into a house with a very neglected hawthorn hedge. It was severely choked with brambles and ivy; once those had been cleared there was very little left, just a handful of spindly stems and branches with lots of big gaps.

I assumed it would all need to be replaced, but my wife suggested we hire a professional hedge layer to tend to the hedge. He cut through the old stems and bent them over to stimulate new growth, adding a framework of vertical stakes and woven horizontal binders (hazel, I think) to hold them in place. It really was a work of art.

And it worked! Several years later the hedge was growing like crazy, and today it’s perfectly healthy (although sadly there is now little evidence of the hedge layer’s artwork; his support structure has mostly rotted away and what remains is hidden deep inside the thriving hedge).