By Lois Scott, Master Gardener

A dead hedge, rather than being someone’s landscaping failure, is a convenient way to recycle wood and other garden trimmings generated in our gardens.  It is basically a controlled pile of material that accumulates from pruning woody plants such as shrubs or other garden detritus. Brush piles are valuable but the idea here is to create a structure as a design element in your garden.  It could serve as a privacy screen, a garden bed edging, windbreak or even a plant support.  The gardener determines the height, width and length within some suggested guidelines.  Your construction can be boxy, wavy, tall or short depending on your garden design needs and preferences.  There a number of resources that offer details on the construction and benefits of a dead hedge.

A dead hedge is comprised of 2 opposing rows of supports that are pounded into the ground.  The rows can be as narrow as you want up to approximately 1.5 metres apart.  The stakes in each row can also be close together or up to 1.5 metres apart.  Wooden stakes, tree branches or steel rebar pounded into the ground make up the supporting structure.  These 2 rows create a gap which you then start filling with your chosen material.  The material in a dead hedge will compress and decompose over time making it possible to keep adding to it.  Meanwhile your hedge is providing habit and food for mammals, birds and insects plus adding nutrients to the soil.  Master Gardener Thom Luloff’s blog on the importance of dead wood in the garden is an excellent read.

The idea of a dead hedge had huge appeal for me as every pruning job produced a pile of trimmings that needed to be cut up, bundled and put out as yard waste.  It takes fewer cuts for me to fit it on my hedge and no need to package it up and haul it to the curb.  I was also running out of places to ‘artistically’ place wood in my garden. 

My dead hedge screens the compost bins in a back corner of the garden, plants growing around it integrate it into the garden and the wildlife loves it!  For me, it is a very positive addition to my controlled chaos garden.