Hedge Trimming for Golden Square Homes

A fair picture of hedge trimming in Golden Square is a corner block a couple of streets from the Wade Street oval: a brick house from the 1960s built on part of an old miner's residence area, a photinia hedge along the footpath that was last cut two years ago and now stands well over head height, and a pittosporum screen down the side fence that the neighbours would rather not lose. That is the job we get asked to do most in this suburb, so it is where this page starts.

How that corner-block job goes

We start at the corner. The photinia has grown wide as well as tall, and a driver pulling out of the side street cannot see along the main road, so the end of the hedge nearest the intersection is brought down first to a height you can see over from a car. The rest of the footpath face is trimmed vertical and the top taken down to a level line with a string and a long-reach hedge trimmer, working from the footpath so nothing is dropped on the road. Photinia takes a hard cut well, so a hedge that has crept up over the years can be brought back a good way without leaving it bare, and the fresh red flush covers the cuts within weeks.

The pittosporum down the side is a different proposition. It was planted as a screen, not a formal hedge, and the owner wants it to stay soft-edged. We take the height back to a little above the fence line so the neighbour still gets their privacy, thin out the dead and crossing wood inside it that nobody has seen for years, and shape the outer face lightly by hand rather than shearing it flat. The whole job is a morning for two of us. Clippings go straight through the chipper on the nature strip, the footpath and the gutter are blown clean, and the owner is told when to book the next cut so it never gets that far again.

Why Golden Square hedges are the way they are

The suburb was laid out along Bendigo Creek in the 1850s and its older streets have small front setbacks, so a hedge along the boundary is often the only thing between the front window and the footpath. Blocks were subdivided from large miners' residence areas over the following century, and neighbours sit close, which is why so many side fences have a screen planted along them. Along High Street and the Calder Highway, hedges double as a noise and dust buffer and get planted dense and tall for that reason. And the suburb has a long history with cypress: rows planted as hedges around older weatherboards were left to grow and are now either eight-metre trees or brown-bottomed walls that trimming alone cannot fix.

The climate sets the rest of the rules. Golden Square summers are hot and dry on heavy clay, so a hedge cut hard in January scorches and one cut too late in autumn puts out soft growth that a winter frost burns. Photinia and lilly pilly are trimmed after each flush of growth, in spring and again in late summer. Pittosporum and viburnum are happy with a tidy in spring and a lighter one in autumn. Conifers are cut only into green growth and never into brown wood, because they will not come back from it. Old cypress rows on a boundary are also worth a quick check against the heritage precinct maps if you plan to remove rather than trim them, since a few established plantings in the Laurel Street and Mackenzie Street precincts may count toward streetscape character, and we can confirm that before we start.

How a hedge trim with TB'S Trees runs

When a cypress row has grown past the point of being a hedge, it is usually cheaper and tidier to treat it as a tree job, which is where our tree removal in Golden Square page takes over, with the line of stumps handled by stump grinding in Golden Square. Screens of larger trees such as pittosporum grown to full height are reduced under tree pruning in Golden Square. We trim hedges to the same lines in Kangaroo Flat, Maiden Gully and Bendigo itself. Species, tools and timing for the whole region are covered on the main hedge trimming page, and everything else we do in the suburb is on the Golden Square page.

Hedge questions from Golden Square gardens