Areas we cover

Sandwich, Deal, Dover, Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne Bay, Faversham and Folkestone. On the exposed coast at Thanet and along the shore from Whitstable round to Deal, salt-laden wind is the limiting factor, and the hedges that survive it are the salt-tolerant evergreens: escallonia, griselinia, and in shelter behind them privet and euonymus. Both escallonia and griselinia want a lighter, slightly earlier cut than an inland hedge, because scorched growth on the windward face needs the season's new shoots to cover it.

Canterbury is a different job entirely. Clipped box and yew in the walled gardens and the streets around the cathedral, formal work with a line and a level, and beech and hornbeam holding their brown winter leaf on the older residential roads out towards Whitstable. Box in the city needs watching for box blight, Calonectria pseudonaviculata, and for box tree caterpillar, Cydalima perspectalis, which is now well established in the south east.

Ashford, Maidstone, Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks. This is where the old mixed hedgerows are: hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple and hazel, often on a bank, frequently older than the house behind them. They are the most forgiving hedges in the county and the most commonly ruined, because they will take a hard cut and then get given one every year until the base is bare and the whole thing is a row of thin stems with a hat on.

Alongside them, the post-war estates around Ashford, Maidstone and Tonbridge carry a great deal of leylandii, planted as a quick screen and now routinely twenty feet or more. Leylandii and the other Cupressaceae will not reshoot from brown wood, so the honest answer on a neglected conifer screen is often less reduction than the owner hoped for. Around Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells there is more yew, the one conifer that does break from old wood, and therefore the one overgrown conifer hedge we can genuinely bring back.

Gravesend, Chatham and Rochester. Dense Victorian and Edwardian streets where the hedge is a front garden boundary a metre or two long, and the species is usually privet or laurel because both are vigorous and both tolerate hard pruning. Privet here will want two cuts a year to stay crisp. Laurel is best cut with secateurs rather than run over with a hedge trimmer, because a trimmer slices the large leaves and the cut edges brown off within a fortnight, which is exactly what you notice from the pavement. Further out towards the North Downs the gardens open up and the boundaries get longer, with more beech, hornbeam and mixed native hedging on the chalk.