Rootballed Yew, Large Hedge Plants

Taxus baccata: Large Rootballed Yew Trees, Ideal for 'Instant Hedging'

These large rootballed yew trees are the largest sizes that you can order from us.

• They are the nearest thing you can get to an "instant" yew hedge.
• They are also great for planting singly in a border to become topiary specimens.
• For smaller, cheaper plants, have a look at our full range of yew hedging.

Yew is an extremely hardy and disease resistant native tree. Its lush evergreen needles clip beautifully into a formal and functional privacy hedge that should add value to any property's garden. Unlike other conifers, it produces red, berry-like "fruit" instead of cones in early winter.

Grown as a tree, it will reach between 10 and 20 metres depending on how much it spreads, but probably not in any of our lifetimes. Old trees have attractive, rusty-brown bark that flakes off, providing housing for insects.

Browse our evergreen hedging plants, our full range of hedging, or our trees.

Delivery season: Rootballed Yew hedge plants are only delivered during winter (November-March) and will be delivered on a pallet.

Choosing a size: With big, comparatively expensive plants like these rootballed Yew, it's really up to your budget to decide which size you want. Smaller trees are cheaper, easier to handle and more forgiving of less than ideal aftercare, so they are best for a big planting project. If instant impact is your priority, or if you are only buying a few plants for use in a place where it is convenient to water them well in their first year, then you may as well use bigger ones.
All our rootballed trees are measured by their height in centimetres above the ground (the roots aren't measured).

Features:

• Height: 10-20m as a tree
• Clips beautifully into a formal evergreen hedge
• One of the best hedges for adding value to a property
• Soil: Any well-drained, shade-tolerant
• Native
• RHS Award of Garden Merit
• Bareroot delivery only: November-March

Growing Yew

Yew will grow in any well-drained soil, and it tolerates deep shade.

A yew hedge can be clipped and pruned hard if necessary: it makes new shoots from old wood, so recovers from mistakes with shears and trimmers.
Neglected yew hedges that have been allowed to become sparse can be cut back hard to encourage dense new growth. You can do this in one go, but if you have time then it is best to do it in chunks over two or three years, so that new shoots have time to develop from the bottom of the trunk.

Spacing Rootballed Yew plants in a hedge: These large Yew plants have quite wide rootballs, so they should be planted 60-75 apart along the hedgerow.

Growing Yew:

Yew will grow in any well-drained conditions. It tolerates shade, cold winds, frost pockets and it will grow quite close to the sea.
Yew will not grow well if the site is too damp or if there is too much waterlogging in winter. It will tolerate a certain amount of seasonal flooding, as long as it passes quickly.

Prepare your site before planting:
Native hedge plants like Yew are very tough. The only essential preparation is to kill the weeds in a strip a metre wide along the planting site: improving the soil should not be necessary. If your soil is poor and dry, then digging in some well-rotted manure and/or compost is worthwhile.

Watch our video on how to plant a garden hedge for full details. The plants in this video are delivered pot-grown, but planting out bareroot stock is essentially the same.
Remember to water establishing plants during dry weather for at least a year after planting.

Hedge Planting Accessories:
Prepare your site for planting by killing the weeds and grass.
Rabbit and deer won't eat Yew, so it doesn't need a plastic guard.
If your soil quality is poor, we recommend using mycorrhizal "friendly fungi" on the roots of new trees and shrubs.

After you plant a hedge, the most important thing to do is water it in dry weather. If you didn't use mulch of some kind, you will also need to weed around the hedge. Both of these will be necessary for at least a year after planting.
Like all evergreen plants, Yew is active and using water throughout the year. This means that if the weather is dry in winter, your establishing plants need to be watered.

Trimming Formal hedge plants:
Your Yew doesn't need any clipping at all in its first year. From the winter after planting onwards, your young hedge should be trimmed lightly once a year, until it is mature. When it is fully grown, you can clip it at anytime.
To help your plants to grow quickly, do not trim their central, leading stems until they have reached the desired height. After you cut the tops off the central stems, the plants will grow noticeable more slowly.

Special notes on caring for Yew hedges:
Yew is a very tough hedge plant that shouldn't need special attention once it has established. If you didn't use a mulch fabric, it is beneficial to mulch around the base of the hedge each year.

Hygiene & Diseases:
Dead, damaged or diseased wood can be pruned off as soon as it appears.
Disinfect your pruning tools between every cut if there is any sign of disease.
Burn or dispose of any diseased material, do not compost it.

Did You Know?

In the age of our animist ancestors, the Yew tree was a god of death and rebirth. It lives for thousands of years, growing in the darkest heart of the forest and on freezing mountain slopes. Old yew trees tend to spread outwards and slump a bit as their heavy branches pull open their centre, often creating a thick, wide evergreen canopy quite close to the ground. As the original, main trunk gradually splits apart and rots away, these low branches can root where they rest on the soil, thus resurrecting. It is easy to imagine clans of Stone Age humans constructing homes under them, perhaps using the long, low, rigid branches as ceiling beams, sheltering from the late Autumn winds and fending off famished bears. The sacred quiet beneath the oldest Yews was a place of reverence. It housed the wizened, gnarled face of the god itself: a massive, brooding creature that did not suffer cold or time. The red flesh of Yew's fruit was a nourishing treasure to our ancestors in winter, but anyone who bit down on the seed inside could have been paralysed and possibly killed, which surely added to the awe that this unique tree inspired.
These "berries" have an interesting flavour and an unfortunately slimy texture, however, it is essential that you spit the seed out without chewing it. If you swallow one by accident, it won't be a problem as long as you didn't bite into it.

Taxus is Latin for Yew, and baccata means to have berries, bacca.

Yew is superb firewood, but it needs to be split and then seasoned for several years before it will burn beautifully.

"He that in winter should behold some of our highest Hills in Surrey, clad with whole woods of these two last sort of trees, yew and box, might without the least violence to his imagination, easily phansie himself transported into some new, or enchanted Country."

John Evelyn, 1662