← All guides · Hedge-laying · September 2026

Hedge laying on chalk: before and after

Most of the field boundary hedges around Shepherdswell and Coldred were laid at some point in their history, then switched to annual machine trimming. After twenty or thirty years of trimming with no laying, the lower metre goes bare and see-through while the top stays dense. Here is what that looks like before a lay, what the same hedge looks like once it's done, and how the South of England method actually works on thin chalk soil.

Before

A field boundary hedge that has been machine-trimmed but never laid carries its own signature: plenty of growth across the top, often a dense cap a metre or more wide, but the bottom half is exposed and leggy. The main stems have thickened to the point where there's real woody structure down low, but no side shoots filling the space between them. You can see straight through at sheep height, sometimes at cattle height too. The hedge still looks like a hedge from a distance, but it has stopped doing its main job as a stock-proof boundary, and each year of trimming without any laying intervention makes the bare-bottom problem worse, not better.

After

A freshly laid hedge in the South of England style sits at around 1.2 to 1.5 metres: lower and more compact than the overgrown version, with the main stems (the pleachers) bent down to roughly 35 to 45 degrees and woven through a row of upright hazel stakes, then secured with hazel binders running along the top. It looks raw immediately after laying, bare stems at an angle with no leaf, but it is already stock-proof right to the ground. By the following spring, dormant buds along the laid stems throw vigorous upright shoots that begin to fill the structure back in, and within two to three growing seasons the laid hedge is denser than the trimmed version it replaced, this time dense from the base up rather than just on top.

What happens in between

Hedge laying is winter work: once the leaves have dropped and before the sap rises in late February. The South of England style, as set out in HedgeLink's practical guide and demonstrated in their instructional film, is the regional method for Kent and the Home Counties and suits the mixed native species of the North Downs field boundaries well. The sequence runs as follows:

• Clear the base first. Bramble, elder and any dead wood come out before a single pleacher is touched. On chalk, elder self-seeds freely into the hedge base and needs pulling or cutting flush at this stage, it regrows vigorously and will compete hard with the laid stems if left.
• Select the pleachers. The main living stems, usually hawthorn and blackthorn on a typical Coldred or Eythorne boundary, that are straight enough to bend without splitting. Any stems that are too thick to lay cleanly, too forked, or too far out of line are cut out entirely. The target is one to two main stems per 30 to 40 centimetres of hedge length.
• Make the cut. Each pleacher is cut at a low angle near its base, leaving a tongue of wood and bark about a third of the stem's diameter intact. The tongue keeps the flow of sap running from the roots to the laid stem, this is what makes laying a living technique rather than just weaving cut wood. On chalk, where the stems tend to be slightly drier and less pliable than on heavy clay, working in the middle of the dormant season, December or January, gives the most flexibility.
• Lay the pleachers. Bent gently down to the laying angle, roughly 35 to 45 degrees from horizontal, and overlapped along the hedge line. The angle and the consistent overlap are the two things that turn a collection of bent stems into a hedge rather than a pile of brash.
• Drive the stakes. Hazel or chestnut stakes, pointed at the base, driven vertically through the laid stems every 40 to 50 centimetres. On chalk the ground can be very hard even in midwinter; a short-handled mallet and a pilot hole with a bar iron gets stakes in without splitting them.
• Weave the binders. Long, flexible hazel rods woven horizontally along the top of the laid stems and around the stakes, working from one end to the other. The binders hold the shape through the first growing season until the new upright shoots and root system can hold it themselves.

What the chalk makes different

Two things are worth knowing about laying on North Downs chalk specifically. First, the soil is hard and free-draining, which means the hedge base is often drier than it looks even after rain, and stems that would flex easily on clay can feel slightly less pliable here. Working in December rather than late autumn, when the wood has fully hardened into dormancy, gives slightly better results than trying to lay stems that still have a trace of sap movement. Second, the species mix on a typical chalk-downland boundary hedge, hawthorn as the dominant stem with blackthorn, field maple and sometimes dogwood mixed in, responds very well to laying. All four species regenerate freely from the tongue cut, and field maple in particular throws particularly strong upright shoots from the laid stems in the first spring after the work.

Sources: HedgeLink, "How to...Traditional Hedge Laying in the South of England Style" (hedgelink.org.uk; YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=iGncS_lojlI); National Hedgelaying Society, South of England style guidance (hedgelaying.org.uk); Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, section 1.