Hedge trimming around California Gully cottages and units

California Gully's hedges tell you how old the house is. The weatherboard cottages from the mining days tend to have cypress or pittosporum planted as a windbreak that have long since become trees. The infill units of the last few decades run to photinia and lilly pilly along the driveway, and the newer subdivisions on the old big blocks favour tight, formal viburnum and conifer screens. TB'S Trees does hedge trimming in California Gully across all of them, so here are the questions residents actually ask us.

Which hedges cope with California Gully's stony ground?

The soil here is a thin layer over quartz rubble and mullock, and it dries out fast in a Bendigo summer, so the hedges that thrive are the tough ones. Photinia is the workhorse and handles the heat and the poor ground once through its first two summers. Lilly pilly does well on the shadier side of a unit block and can be kept tight; it gets psyllid pimpling on new growth, which regular trimming helps. Pittosporum tolerates the dry but goes leggy if left. Viburnum is fine in formal runs with some water. Conifers, the Leighton Green and similar cypress hedges, are the ones we are most often asked to rescue, because they have been let go and will not regrow from bare wood.

When should a hedge in California Gully be cut?

Most broadleaf hedges get two cuts a year here: one after the spring flush has hardened, around late November, and a tidy-up in late summer or early autumn once the worst heat has passed. We avoid trimming in a heatwave, because freshly cut photinia and lilly pilly scorch badly in a run of forty-degree days. Conifers are best trimmed in late spring or early autumn while actively growing, never in deep winter or midsummer. Through spring we check for nesting birds first; wattlebirds and blackbirds love a dense photinia.

How high can a hedge go on a small block?

There is no single hedge height limit in the City of Greater Bendigo planning scheme, but there are practical ones. On a six-hundred-square-metre block a hedge over about two and a half metres starts shading the neighbour's yard and blocking their winter sun. Service lines cross a lot of these yards at four to five metres, and a conifer that reaches them stops being a hedge job and becomes a powerline clearance job. Pick a height you can maintain from a ladder or a small platform, around two metres for a boundary hedge, and hold it there. A hedge let go to four metres can be brought down, but broadleaf hedges take a season to recover and conifers may not fill back in below the cut.

Formal or informal: which suits these gardens?

A formal hedge is cut flat on top and slightly narrower at the top than the bottom, so the lower growth gets light and the hedge stays dense to the ground. It suits photinia, viburnum, lilly pilly and conifers, and the tidy frontages of the unit developments. An informal hedge is cut to a soft, rounded shape only every so often; it suits pittosporum, callistemon and westringia screens along the back of a cottage block. Most California Gully gardens end up with one of each: formal along the driveway or street, informal along the back fence.

Has your hedge turned into a row of trees?

This is the most common conversation we have in the older parts of the suburb. A row of cypress or pittosporum planted along the fence fifty years ago has become a line of six-metre trees with bare trunks, hanging over the neighbour's shed and the service line. Trimming it will not bring the screen back at eye level. The options are to reduce it heavily and accept a bare hedge for a year or more, to remove it and replant something that screens quickly, or to remove alternate plants and reduce the rest. Where a full row comes out, the stumps can be ground the same day, covered on our stump grinding in California Gully page. Where the row is worth keeping as trees, it becomes a job for tree pruning in California Gully instead.

A typical hedge trimming job in California Gully

A typical job is a set of three or four units off a shared driveway near the Loudon Street recreation reserve end of the suburb, with a photinia hedge that has crept into the turning space and a lilly pilly screen along the back boundary starting to shade the neighbour. We come with trimmers on poles, a platform ladder and the chipper on the trailer, cut the photinia back to a straight face and level top on a string line, take the lilly pilly down to the height agreed with the neighbour, and feed the clippings straight into the chipper. The driveway is blown off and the job is done in a few hours. Where the hedge belongs to an owners corporation or a rental, we deal with the manager directly and put it on a regular schedule, so it never gets to the stage of a rescue.

Hedge trimming questions we hear around California Gully