← All guides · Reduction & renovation · September 2026

Overgrown laurel hedge: hard renovation prune, or remove and replant?

A great many gardens around Goodnestone, Chillenden and the villages toward Wingham carry a cherry laurel hedge planted in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. At the time it was the default choice: fast, evergreen, tolerant of shade and clay, available cheaply from any garden centre. Thirty years on, a lot of those hedges are 2 to 3 metres wide, have lost foliage from the lower half, and take a significant amount of cutting each year just to stay within bounds. The question I get asked fairly regularly is whether it is worth trying to renovate them, or whether the honest answer is to take them out and start again.

Why this decision is genuinely two-sided

Cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is one of the few large-leaved evergreen shrubs that will break new growth from old, bare wood. Cut it back hard to the main structural stems in late February or early March, and within six to eight weeks it will push new shoots from wood that looks completely dead. That makes the renovation option real rather than wishful thinking. It is not the same situation as an overgrown Leylandii, which will not regenerate from brown bare wood at all. With laurel, the biology supports renovation. The question is whether it is the right thing for this particular hedge.

The decision: renovate with a hard prune, or remove and replant?

Pros of hard renovation pruning

• Laurel genuinely regrows from bare wood. Cut back to the main framework in late February, and new shoots appear within a single growing season. By late summer of the same year, a renovated laurel hedge will be visibly green and recovering, though not yet dense. By year two it will have closed up considerably.
• The root system is already there. New growth from an established root system develops faster than a newly planted hedge. A renovated laurel will be back to a reasonable screening height within two growing seasons; a new native hedge or yew planted from bare-root whips takes five to seven years to reach the same point.
• Dramatically cheaper than replacement. A professional renovation prune on a 10-metre run of overgrown laurel is a modest job, including clearing the arisings. Replacing the same hedge, with new planting, costs considerably more.
• No soil disturbance and no replanting gap. The bed stays in place. There is no several-week period of bare soil to manage, no risk of the bank or boundary being exposed while you wait for replacement plants to establish.

Cons of hard renovation pruning

• The hedge looks brutal for one full growing season. After a hard cut, you are left with a row of thick, stubby dark-barked stems about 60 to 90 centimetres tall. It looks worse than anything the hedge looked like before, for the first four to six months. If this hedge is on a road frontage or visible from a listed building, that is a genuine cost to weigh.
• The base structure problem. If the hedge has been left for a very long time and the individual stems are now 15 to 20 centimetres in diameter with gaps at the base, renovation may produce a result that is too gappy to work as a screen. Laurel breaks new growth from the stem bark, but it cannot fill a gap where there is no wood. A hedge that has already thinned badly at the base will not reliably close after renovation.
• You end up with laurel again. This is not always a problem, but if the reason the hedge has outgrown its position is that it was the wrong species for the site, renovation restarts the same cycle in three to five years. You will need to maintain it more actively afterwards to prevent it reaching the same overgrown state.
• If your garden is important to you aesthetically through the summer, a year of looking at bare renovation stumps is a real sacrifice, not just a minor inconvenience.

Pros of removing and replanting

• Fresh start with the right species. Removing the laurel gives you the opportunity to plant something genuinely more suited to the site: a native hawthorn and blackthorn mix for a field boundary with real biodiversity value, a formal yew for a parkland edge, hornbeam for a formal deciduous hedge that tolerates the clay. The replacement can be chosen for the specific conditions, not inherited from a previous owner's decisions.
• Opportunity to address structural problems. If the hedge is in the wrong position (too close to the house, overhanging a path, blocking light that could now be let in), removal lets you reset the line entirely. Renovation keeps the hedge exactly where it is.
• A native hedge replacement genuinely increases biodiversity. Cherry laurel offers almost nothing to native insects or birds for nesting compared with hawthorn, blackthorn or field rose. On a rural boundary around Goodnestone or Chillenden, where the wider farmland hedgerow network has real ecological value, a native mix hedge is a meaningful contribution.
• Long-term less work. An appropriately sized species in the right position, maintained from the beginning, produces less ongoing labour than a repeatedly over-renovated laurel on a site it was never quite suited to.

Cons of removing and replanting

• Significantly more expensive. Removal of an established laurel hedge, grinding the stumps or digging out the root mass, preparing the soil and planting a new hedge runs to considerably more than a renovation prune. On a 10-metre run, expect to spend three to five times more than the renovation cost, and that does not account for the aftercare watering in the first growing season.
• Long wait for any screening. A native hedge planted as 60 to 90 centimetre bare-root whips will not provide meaningful privacy screening for four or five years. Yew planted at the same size takes eight to ten years. If the hedge is currently providing any privacy or shelter, you lose it for a considerable period.
• Old laurel roots are a genuine nuisance for new planting. Cherry laurel root systems are extensive and decompose slowly. If new plants are put in immediately after removal, they are competing with decaying but still-present root mass and any allelopathic compounds the laurel may have released into the soil. Ideally, leave the soil a full growing season before replanting, which extends the gap period to two years.

How to actually decide

The renovation option is genuinely the right call when: the hedge is under about 20 years old, the main stems are still relatively upright and not gapped at the base, the position is correct for the boundary, and the owner is prepared for one season of the hedge looking very bare. In those conditions, a hard renovation prune followed by consistent maintenance going forward is a sound decision.

The removal option becomes the better choice when: the hedge has lost foliage from the lower half and the base is already gappy; the position is wrong and needs to change; or the owner wants a different species in that position and is prepared to wait several years for it to establish. If biodiversity matters on that boundary, that tips the balance toward replacement with a native mix, even with the cost and wait involved.

The worst outcome I see is a poorly-timed hard prune that goes into the nesting season, which I cover below, or a renovation on a hedge whose base is already too far gone to close up properly. If the stems at the base are more than about 20 centimetres apart at ground level before any cutting, renovation is unlikely to produce a result that reads as a proper screen.

If you renovate: timing, tools and what to expect

The best window for a hard renovation prune on laurel is late February, before the first burst of spring growth and before the 1 March nesting season risk window (see below). Cut back to a main framework of stems at 60 to 90 centimetres from the ground. The top cut should be a clean cut with loppers or a pruning saw, not a hedge trimmer. The large-leaved laurel is notorious for browning around torn or bruised cut edges when a hedge trimmer is used on the main framework. Use loppers or a sharp pruning saw on anything above finger thickness, and only use shears or a battery trimmer for the lightest surface tidying once the hedge has regrown and you are maintaining rather than renovating.

Clear all the arisings: a full renovation on 10 metres of mature laurel generates several cubic metres of material, which will not fit in a green bin and needs either a skip, a chipper, or collection by whoever is doing the work. Factor this in when comparing costs.

After renovation, apply a general-purpose slow-release fertiliser to the base of the hedge in March, and keep the base clear of competing grass and weeds for the first full growing season. The hedge will look bare through March and April. By May you will see new buds along the cut stems. By August the hedge will have a reasonable flush of new foliage and will look like a hedge again rather than a row of stakes. By the following summer it will be approaching the kind of density you want.

Near Goodnestone Park and the church

If the laurel hedge is on a boundary within or adjacent to the setting of Goodnestone Park (Registered Park and Garden of Special Historic Interest, built 1704) or Holy Cross Church (Grade I listed), the renovation pruning of an existing hedge does not itself require consent. However, if you are removing the hedge entirely and it has reached tree-scale stems (roughly 75 millimetres or more in diameter at 1.5 metres from ground level), a section-211 notice to Dover District Council may be needed before removal. I cover the notice process and the conditions that trigger it in the guide on hedge rules near the Park and the church.

Sources: RHS, Prunus laurocerasus growing guide and renovation pruning guidance (rhs.org.uk); Woodland Trust, species guide for cherry laurel; Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, section 1; Town and Country Planning Act 1990, section 211; Historic England, Register of Parks and Gardens (Goodnestone Park entry).