Hornbeam Hedging Plants

Hornbeam is probably the most popular deciduous hedging plant in the country for shadier and damper sites where beech won't grow: they're very similar looking.

It's extremely tough and easy to grow. Many times down the years, we've heard from people who didn't water a garden's worth of new plants in Summer, and most of them died ... except the Hornbeam!

Browse our other hedging plants.

Its leaves are the most brilliant of greens in spring; Monty Don says that the colour makes his "eyes dance". The veins on each leaf are separated by a corrugated trough so that the leaf with its serrated edge looks a bit crinkled which gives the hedge an interesting texture. The trunks and bark of hornbeam are always well shaped and slightly ridged. In the autumn (unless it has been exceptionally dry) the leaves turn a clear yellow before becoming pale brown for the winter.

Features

Size sold: 40-175 cm
Height: 1m to very tall
Soil: all soils
Use: Formal/Native
Colour: green/brown
Feature: tolerant of damp, heavy soil
"Impossible" to go wrong!
RHS Award of Garden Merit

Growing Hornbeam

Hornbeam will thrive in almost all soils, unless it's completely waterlogged all year, but prefers a well-drained rich soil. It'll grow more slowly and a bit less luxuriantly, but happy nonetheless, in close to full shade. In open, sunny conditions, it's fast-growing.

Just like with beech, if you trim the hedge in mid-summer, the winter leaves will be 'everciduous', meaning that they stay on the branches until next spring.

Spacing a Hornbeam hedge:

Deciduous formal hedging like Hornbeam and Beech gives the best privacy at 4 plants per metre in a staggered double row, planted 50cm apart along each row with 40cm between rows.
Where privacy isn't an issue, the normal 3 plants per metres in a single row is fine.

Garden Design Ideas

It's as an excellent hedging plant, and the best alternative to green beech. Saplings shoot up if well-watered, so within a year or two you will have a tight-knit, low hedge, and over a few more years the potential to possess a tall hedge. A solid, trimmed hornbeam hedge can stand alone in a formal garden with little to distract from it, or can be used behind a mixed border to focus attention on the flowers by providing a consistent, green background.

It's not a specimen tree for a small garden, because it reaches 20 metres without difficulty. It does make for a great park or woodland tree, look at Hatfield and Epping Forests, though, and Carpinus fastigiata with its wonderful, slim column of leaves is suitable for most gardens.

Hornbeam responds well to training. Use it to create tunnels, alleys or more commonly to act as a pleached hedge where the hedge part is raised above the bare trunks. Pleached hornbeam hedges are an elegant boundary wall that divides a garden into different 'rooms', without the enclosed feeling of evergreen hedges. Ham House has a good example of a tunnel of pleached hornbeam emerging from a low-growing yew hedge. Grown in this way, you can cover up the bare trunks at the base, with a combination of forget-me-nots and tulips for the spring and small peonies for summer, or just good old lavender if there is enough sun.

History & Trivia

It has been a highly valued tree for many years because its timber is the hardest grown in this country. There is a venerable tradition of hornbeam being used to create butcher's chopping blocks, piano hammers and pulley blocks. It was often grown as wood 'pasture', leaving room for cattle to graze around the pollarded trees, which were pruned every few years for firewood and small objects like handles. The density is excellent for firewood and for making charcoal.

To see hornbeam at its most splendid, take a trip to Het Loo in Holland to see the Queen's garden, a labyrinth of covered walkways, caves and tunnels all fashioned from hornbeam grown over an oak trellis.
The best example of a pleached hornbeam hedge can be seen at Hidcote Gardens.

Formal Hedging

Hornbeam Hedging Plants