PJ wrote in message
m...
Hello

I have a quandary over what to do about the hedge at the front of my
house.

The hedge is a privet about 6 foot tall, which is exactly how I like it
as it
create tremendous privacy from the road. The problem is the hedge only
goes
along half the front of the house, the other half has nothing, no hedge
or
anything.

The reason for this is that the previous owner of the house took away
half
the hedge so he could put his car in the front garden.

I have taken up the flagstones he'd put down for the car in the garden
and
created a small lawn. My next job is to fill in this section of missing
hedge.
What I'd really like is simply to have the 6 foot high privet continued
so
I'll have a nice 6 foot hedge right across the front of the garden.
Having
looked at the hedge plants at my local gardening centres I see that
they are
approx 1 foot tall and I haven't a clue how long it will take them to
become
6 foot hedges.

Also I don't know how long privet hedges remain good for. I have this
horrible feeling that I will watch the new privet hedge grow gradually
over
years only to discover that when it has reached the height of the
current
mature hedge, maybe the old hedge will die of old age or something...

Another possibility would be to remove the mature privet and put a new
hedge
right across the front. The downside of this for me is that I do love
having
the tall hedge now and it would presumably take a very long time for
the new
hedge to get tall all the way across.

Privet is quite quick growing, but a hedge will last for a very large
number of years, at my parents house the hedge had been in place for 70+
years and was still going strong and still kept to a reasonable size,
Privet will also root quite well from cuttings, as anyone who ahs used
privet as a row marker will know.

Mike
www.british-naturism.org.uk