Jake Hobson
Creating a hedge from scratch could be compared with the trick of distressing new furniture to give it character and make it look old, or intentionally ripping your jeans. It works, but never quite as satisfyingly as doing it the slow way, letting time add character. As with so much in the garden, time is the master.
So, where to begin? If you have less time than money, there there is a short cut. Thoughtful nurseries have started growing ready-made cloud hedges, planted in rows to be numbered, root balled and replanted in formation. This is the quickest solution, and its off-the-shelf appearance is not to be sniffed at, for the techniques used to get it this far are exactly the same as you would use when doing it yourself. Scale is an issue here though, as inevitably the size of the hedge is limited by what is available for sale. One nursery I visiting in Belgium, Solitair, had an enormous piece of box for sale, the size and shape of a resting elephant, but this was an exception, and more often the material available is much smaller. Tom Stuart-Smith used this approach in his 2010 Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Chelsea garden, arranging established box balls into a shape to give the impression of a far older, more mature hedge, although interestingly he chose not to clip them for the show, preferring a softer look that was more in keeping with the rest of the planting. Once planted in situ, it would only take another year or two for the lines of the box to become more fluid, were some of the shapes allowed to flow into each other…
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