Hedge & Shrub Trimming

The one rule that governs cedar hedges

White cedar, the hedge on most lot lines in Durham Region, will not regrow from bare wood. Cut into the brown interior where there is no green foliage and that section stays brown permanently. Deciduous hedges like privet, beech, hornbeam or ninebark do not work this way and can be cut hard and will come back. Cedar, spruce, juniper and yew mostly cannot, with yew as the main exception.

This matters because of what it means for an overgrown hedge. If your cedars have grown two feet wider than you want them, the green is now only on the outer several inches and everything inside is bare. Cutting back to the width you want means cutting into bare wood, and you will be looking at a brown wall that never recovers.

So the honest answer for a badly overgrown cedar hedge is one of three things: keep it at roughly its current width and simply maintain it neatly from now on, reduce it gradually over several years by taking a little more each season and letting green regrow on the outside before going further, or replace it. Anyone who tells you they can cut a mature cedar hedge back by two feet and have it green up next year is either mistaken or not being straight with you.

Height is different from width. You can take real height off a cedar hedge, because you are cutting the top back to where there is still green on the sides, and the top will thicken over. Bringing a nine-foot hedge down to six is a normal job with a good result. Narrowing that same hedge by two feet is not.

When to cut, and the nesting rule that is not optional

For cedar, the best windows are late spring after the first flush of growth has hardened, and late summer into early autumn. Avoid cutting in a heatwave or a drought, because a freshly cut hedge with reduced foliage is under stress and cannot cope with the water loss. Avoid late autumn, because you are pushing tender new growth right into frost. A light tidy in winter does no harm but achieves little.

Deciduous hedges are best cut in the dormant season for hard work and in mid-summer for a light shape-up. Flowering shrubs are cut according to when they flower, not when it suits you: prune spring bloomers like lilac, forsythia and weigela right after they finish, and summer bloomers in late winter. Cut a lilac in March and you have cut off this year's flowers.

Nesting birds are a legal matter, not a preference. In Ontario, migratory birds, their nests and their eggs are protected, and the main nesting season runs roughly April through August. Practically, that means the hedge gets checked before anything is cut. If there is an active nest, that section waits until the young have fledged. We will do the rest and come back, or reschedule. This is not us being awkward, and it is worth being wary of any contractor happy to run a hedge trimmer through a nesting cedar in June.

How we cut, and what a good hedge looks like

A hedge should be slightly narrower at the top than the bottom. A hedge with vertical or, worse, top-heavy sides shades its own base, and a shaded cedar base thins out and goes bare from the bottom up. That gappy lower third that so many older hedges have is usually the result of years of being cut straight up and down.

A hedge should be cut to a line rather than by eye, and to the same line each visit, so it stays crisp instead of creeping outward a few inches a year. That creep is how hedges end up too wide in the first place.

Everything gets cleaned up: clippings raked and collected out of the hedge base as well as off the lawn, beds and hard surfaces cleared, and taken away. Leaving clippings piled against a cedar base holds moisture where you do not want it. It is a small thing that separates a proper job from a fast one.

For a well-kept hedge, once a year is enough for most cedar and twice a year keeps a formal hedge sharp. Once a hedge is on a regular cut, it is quick work.

Shrubs, and the things people ask us to fix

Beyond hedges we do general shrub work: shaping and thinning ornamentals, rejuvenating overgrown or leggy shrubs, taking out dead and diseased material, cutting back shrubs that have swallowed a path or a window, and removing shrubs entirely along with the roots where they are done.

The two most common requests are worth explaining because the answers surprise people. Spruce or pine touching the house cannot be neatly reduced in width, for the same reason as cedar: no regrowth from bare wood. We can lift the lower skirt to clear the building and get light underneath, but a mature spruce three feet from the wall is usually a removal conversation. Overgrown yew is the good news story: yew is the one common conifer that reliably regrows from old wood, so a monstrous yew genuinely can be cut hard back and will recover, though it takes a couple of seasons to look right.

There are also the invasive things nobody planted on purpose. Buckthorn, and to a lesser extent honeysuckle, seeds itself into hedge bases and fence lines all over Durham and Northumberland and grows straight up through the cedar. Cutting it flush achieves nothing because it resprouts, so if it is well established it needs taking out at the root, which is closer to brush clearing than hedge trimming.

Price and where we cut

What decides the size of a hedge job is length, height, how much is coming off, access, and how much material has to be taken away. A hedge that gets trimmed every year is quick work. A ten-year-neglected hedge on its first cut is a much bigger job because of the sheer volume of material, and taking real height off means working at height rather than off the ground, which changes the method.

Tell us the rough length and height when you call, and whether it has been cut recently. That is usually enough for us to know what the job involves before coming out to look at it properly.

Free on-site estimates across Bowmanville, Courtice, Newcastle, Oshawa, Whitby, Port Perry, Port Hope and Cobourg. Windbreak rows on rural properties are a different job from a garden hedge, and they are part of what this covers.