On Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:44:44 +0000, kay
wrote:


harry;894457 Wrote:


Any replacement will take years to grow. Why not cut them back? You
can be as savage as you like.

Well, not quite. You can reduce the height quite easily, although they
might look quite strange with truncated tops. But the OP I think is also
worried about the width, and this is less easy to reduce. If you cut
back beyond the green tips to the branches, they won't regrow, so in
practice you can reduce the width only be a foot or two.

Rather than cutting back it is possible to bend the tops downwards and
fix them to the lower growth. That's what one of my neighbours did to
reduce a 20' high Leylandii "hedge" to about half the height. It
looked a mess at first but after a few years of trimming it looks
quite good.

Steve

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