hedges
Topiary and ornamental shaping
£25 to £100 a piece covers routine clipping of a ball, cone or spiral, and £50 to £80 an hour buys a specialist rather than a general gardener. Formal hedge shaping runs £4 to £15 a metre depending on species and precision.
What this covers
What it costs. Topiary is the least documented of the garden trades for pricing, and published figures are thin. Full cost breakdown.
What the job covers
- Clipping balls, cones, spirals and cloud forms
- Maintaining established shapes to their outline
- Starting a shape on an untrained plant
- Treating box blight and box tree caterpillar
- Feeding and watering clipped specimens
Worth knowing
It is an offence to intentionally damage or destroy the nest of any wild bird while it is in use or being built. There is no date range in the law: the test is whether the nest is active, not what month it is.
Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, section 1
What is involved
Clipping frequency sets the annual bill more than the price per cut does. Box, yew and privet hold a crisp edge with two cuts a year, one in early summer and one in early autumn, while faster subjects such as Lonicera nitida want three or four. A formal box shape takes 20 to 40 minutes for one gardener working with hand shears, which is why per piece pricing of £25 to £100 tracks complexity so closely: a simple ball sits at the bottom, a tiered spiral well above it.
Box has become the difficult part of British topiary. Box blight strips foliage and box tree caterpillar can defoliate a mature specimen in a fortnight, so many gardens have switched to Ilex crenata, Taxus baccata or Euonymus for new shapes. Yew is slower but tolerates hard renovation, cutting back into old wood and reshooting where box rarely does. Wire frames guide new shapes over three to five seasons and cost little compared with the labour of clipping to them.
Renovating a shape that has grown out is a different job from maintaining one. Restoring a neglected yew cone takes two or three seasons of staged cutting, with roughly a third of the overgrowth removed each year so the plant keeps enough leaf to recover. Rates for that work are rarely published, so quotes come as hourly or day figures based on the specialist rate. Green waste removal adds £20 to £50 on most visits and £30 to £60 in London.
Choosing someone for the job
How many cuts a year does the contractor recommend for these species, and what does a year of visits total? Hand shears or powered trimmers, and which for the finished faces? What experience is there of renovating overgrown shapes back into form? Is box blight or box tree caterpillar present, and what treatment or replacement is being suggested? Does the price include taking the clippings away?
Common questions
When should topiary be clipped?
Two cuts suit most formal shapes, the first in late May or June once the first flush has hardened and the second in late August or September. Cutting after early autumn leaves soft regrowth exposed to frost damage.
Can an overgrown shape be brought back?
Yew, holly, privet and beech reshoot readily from old wood and recover over two or three staged seasons. Box seldom breaks from bare stems, so a badly overgrown box piece is often replaced rather than restored.