Hedge Trimming in Strathfieldsaye, Question by Question

A hedge in Strathfieldsaye can be a ten-metre photinia screen behind a new house or a hundred metres of cypress planted as a windbreak forty years ago. The questions owners ask about hedge trimming in Strathfieldsaye are the same either way, so this page works through them.

Which hedge species actually cope with a Strathfieldsaye summer?

The heavier soils around Sheepwash Creek hold water through winter and bake from December, and any hedge here has to put up with both. Photinia handles it and grows fast, which is why it screens half the new back fences in the estates; the price is two or three cuts a season. Lilly pilly copes if it gets water in its first summers, and newer varieties resist the psyllid that pimples older ones. Pittosporum makes a quick screen but goes leggy and can snap in a westerly. Viburnum tinus is slower and tidier. Westringia and callistemon suit rural blocks where a native hedge fits the bush behind it. The old cypress windbreaks along Tannery Lane are a category of their own: dense, effective, and unforgiving once they brown off, because they do not shoot again from old wood.

When should a hedge be cut around here?

For most broadleaf hedges, once after the spring flush has hardened and again in late summer or early autumn so it goes into winter tidy. We avoid cutting on the run of forty-degree days, when fresh cuts and exposed inner leaves scorch, and frosty mornings for anything tender. Lilly pilly and photinia can be cut harder than you think and will flush back. Conifers should only be cut while they are actively growing, in spring or early summer, and never back into brown wood. Flowering hedges get cut after they flower, not before.

Formal lines or a looser screen: what suits a rural-living block?

Near the house and along the entrance a formal hedge earns its keep, with flat faces and a level top. Along the boundaries a looser screen is easier to keep and sits better against paddocks and bush. Either way we cut the faces with a slight taper so the base is wider than the top; a hedge wider at the top shades its own bottom and goes bare there within a couple of seasons, the commonest fault on estate blocks where a hedge was left alone. A screen planted at head height to hide the neighbour's shed keeps going if nobody stops it, and by three metres it is harder and dearer to bring back.

How tall can a hedge get before it stops being a hedge job?

We trim from the ground and from platforms to around three metres comfortably. Beyond that it is elevated work platform territory, and beyond five or six metres a cypress windbreak has become a row of trees. Those can be reduced in height, but not by much, and any cut into old brown wood on a conifer leaves a permanent hole. That work sits under tree lopping in Strathfieldsaye, and when a windbreak is more dead than alive the answer is usually tree removal in Strathfieldsaye followed by stump grinding in Strathfieldsaye so a new hedge can go in the same line.

Does the bushfire overlay change how hedges should be managed?

It does. Much of the rural living land along Strathfieldsaye Road and around Emu Creek is under the Bushfire Management Overlay, with the Mandurang bush of the Greater Bendigo National Park to the south. Cypress and other conifers are among the most flammable plants you can put near a house, and a dead-centred old windbreak on a boundary is a fuel load rather than a screen. In the overlay we clean dead material out of hedges, keep them clear of walls, eaves and decks, and steer new planting near the dwelling towards species that hold moisture, such as lilly pilly or viburnum. On the newer estate blocks the setbacks are narrow, so a privacy hedge can end up hard against the neighbour's wall; we trim those with the neighbour in mind too.

What else is different about hedge work in Strathfieldsaye?

Growth, mainly. The suburb added roughly a quarter to its population between the last two censuses, and estates like Emu Rise along Emu Creek Road and Tannery Fields have thousands of hedge plants in their first few years. Formative trimming then, little and often so the plants thicken from the base, decides whether a hedge is solid at ten years old or a row of bare trunks with leaves on top. On the acreage side the difference is scale: a two-hundred-metre boundary hedge is a day with the chipper following the crew along the fence. We can do tree pruning in Strathfieldsaye on the same visit if the trees above the hedge need attention. The same crew handles hedge trimming in Junortoun to the north, hedge trimming at Axedale near our base, and hedge trimming across Bendigo. The main hedge trimming service page has the species list in more detail, and the Strathfieldsaye suburb page covers everything we do out here.

A few more questions from Strathfieldsaye gardens

A typical Strathfieldsaye hedge job

Thirty metres of photinia along the back fence of a block off Emu Creek Road, planted when the house was built, now two and a half metres tall and getting wider every year. We come in late spring after the red flush has hardened. Three hundred millimetres comes off the top to a string line, both faces are brought back with a slight taper, and the dead wood inside is cleared so air moves through. The chipper sits on the street, the clippings go out through the side gate and are chipped, then blown into a pile for the beds or taken away. Two of us, a morning, and it looks like a hedge again rather than a wall of red shoots. If there is a cypress windbreak on the property, we look at it while we are there and give you an honest answer on whether it can still be trimmed.