Soldato
- Joined
- 7 Feb 2004
- Posts
- 3,072
Well I'm pretty confident this won't be of interest to many of you but maybe a few might find it informative.
Pleaching is a technique used to train trees into a raised hedge, I stumbled across a picture a while ago and thought I'd give it a go in my garden.
So here's the area I chose, I've just laid the patio, planted a dward box hedge and ripped out the border that used to be along the wall.
I decided on Hornbeam trees as these are ideal for pleaching, they are very bendy and graft into each other as they grow, the trees then become as one.
I could have gone for smaller examples that would have been cheaper but obviously you are waiting even longer before it becomes established, these are 8 years old and are 13 - 14ft.
When I laid the patio I knew I would be planting 5 trees so left some gaps, these were't big enough due to the size of the root ball so had to angle grind them bigger, I will evetually be putting small stones in these gaps and also along the box hedge and lawn edging.
It wouldn't be fair on the neighbours to leave the trees at 14 foot as it would seriously block out their light so I decided the finished height would be about 8ft
Next I removed all the lower branches and removed the string that had been used to protect them in transporting them.
You need to make a frame to tie the branches onto and train them, this will be up for approx 7 years so it needs to be sturdy, I decided to use wire secured at both ends to the wall.
I got some metal bar from a black smith, initially I was going to secure the wire to the bar but realised this would put a huge amount of tension on the bar so instead drilled a hole through the bar and secured to metal rings onto a post.
The other end was secured to the wall but then using fencing ratchets to get tension in the wire.
Here comes the tricky part, you need to bend the branches and fasten to the wire, any branches coming straight out the front or back need to be cut or if there aren't any other branches nearby coming out the side, try and bend them as tight as you can.
I found it difficult to select which branches to cut as once cut any mistakes cannot be rectified, you also need to cut any branches that are very close to another.
I also fastened vertical pieces of bamboo to give me extra fastening locations.
Here you can see how thin the trees have become.
So here's how they are looking now and to be fair the pictures don't look great and you're probably wondering what the hell has he done?
Well after a few years, pruning them spring and autumn they fill out and should look like this.
Hopefully it'll be worth the effort.
I'm ready for the standard ocuk reply of it looked better before, hope you enjoyed the read
Pleaching is a technique used to train trees into a raised hedge, I stumbled across a picture a while ago and thought I'd give it a go in my garden.
So here's the area I chose, I've just laid the patio, planted a dward box hedge and ripped out the border that used to be along the wall.
I decided on Hornbeam trees as these are ideal for pleaching, they are very bendy and graft into each other as they grow, the trees then become as one.
I could have gone for smaller examples that would have been cheaper but obviously you are waiting even longer before it becomes established, these are 8 years old and are 13 - 14ft.
When I laid the patio I knew I would be planting 5 trees so left some gaps, these were't big enough due to the size of the root ball so had to angle grind them bigger, I will evetually be putting small stones in these gaps and also along the box hedge and lawn edging.
It wouldn't be fair on the neighbours to leave the trees at 14 foot as it would seriously block out their light so I decided the finished height would be about 8ft
Next I removed all the lower branches and removed the string that had been used to protect them in transporting them.
You need to make a frame to tie the branches onto and train them, this will be up for approx 7 years so it needs to be sturdy, I decided to use wire secured at both ends to the wall.
I got some metal bar from a black smith, initially I was going to secure the wire to the bar but realised this would put a huge amount of tension on the bar so instead drilled a hole through the bar and secured to metal rings onto a post.
The other end was secured to the wall but then using fencing ratchets to get tension in the wire.
Here comes the tricky part, you need to bend the branches and fasten to the wire, any branches coming straight out the front or back need to be cut or if there aren't any other branches nearby coming out the side, try and bend them as tight as you can.
I found it difficult to select which branches to cut as once cut any mistakes cannot be rectified, you also need to cut any branches that are very close to another.
I also fastened vertical pieces of bamboo to give me extra fastening locations.
Here you can see how thin the trees have become.
So here's how they are looking now and to be fair the pictures don't look great and you're probably wondering what the hell has he done?
Well after a few years, pruning them spring and autumn they fill out and should look like this.
Hopefully it'll be worth the effort.
I'm ready for the standard ocuk reply of it looked better before, hope you enjoyed the read
