Hedge laying is pretty important to anyone with an old country hedge: it’s uncommon to see a garden hedge laid, but most species are suitable
Hedge laying is an ancient, pre-Bronze Age technology of cutting and stacking vertical woody stems lengthways, alive, braided in place initially with a wooden hurdle-fence structure.
The cut hedge plants respond with vigorous, bushy-brushy regrowth.
It was super important here after Enclosures started in 1603.
Big open fields were divided by ditches and hedges that had to be kept livestock-proof, with no barbed wire in the shops for centuries.
Hedge laying is routinely done to tough native country hedge plants when they get old and gappy, but the first lay is often when a new hedge is about 15 years old, with mature but still thin flexible, easy to lay stems.
Mature hedges are laid on a decades-long cycle: every 25-50 years as needed for a well maintained country hedge that gets trimmed once a year, or close to it.
A yearly trim can be done by a tractor mounted small flail for mulching mostly green wood, and by hand with any cutting tools.
In practice, many country hedges are trimmed with a heavy flail that crunches branches more like every 2-3 years, which would require saws to cut by hand.
Neglected hedges that fall into disrepair begin turning back into trees; species like Blackthorn that send up sucker-shoots from the root also creep out and widen the hedge.
But no matter how wild she gets, a country hedge loves a good lay to make everything all right again.
Garden hedges tend to get trimmed at least once a year, keeping them in good condition: within reason, the more often you clip a mature hedge, the better its leaves look.
Laying a hedge has many benefits, but it lowers the hedge’s height significantly at first, and most people want year-round privacy from their garden hedge.
Furthermore, hedge laying really should be done by someone with a bit of practice under their belt (search for them here), and those guys aren’t common in urban areas: you’d be hard-pressed to find a garden service company in town that offers hedge laying.
Still, except for most conifers (which don’t regrow after hard pruning), and plants with brittle wood like Holly or Laurel that will snap or tear easily when their stems are mature, there is no reason you can’t lay a typical garden hedge like Yew, Hornbeam, Beech, Privet, or Pyracantha.
Not a lot of people know that the most important art in hedge laying is keeping one’s tobacco pipe at the correct angle:
Is all that enough intro for Paul A. Lamb, a West Country master hedge layer whose book, Of Thorn and Briar, is out next in April next year, and trim movie star looks make our office forget about homely old Russell Crowe?
Better to hear from the man himself: