Hedge Trimming in Pakenham

Box is the clearest case in Pakenham, and it is also the most common phone call we take in July. Freshly cut box is frost-susceptible, so its main shaping trim belongs in spring as growth resumes, not now. The orange-bronze colour a lot of Pakenham box is showing at the moment is a normal response to cold and bright winter sun rather than a disease. It recovers as the weather turns, and cutting it now does not fix it.

Murraya, pittosporum, viburnum and escallonia sit in the same category. Australian guidance puts the structural trim on all four in the growing season, and heavy winter work on them is a spring job brought forward for no good reason. Lilly pilly is the exception worth knowing about: a hard renovation on an overgrown lilly pilly screen is defensible at the end of winter, and that is the single most common August booking we take across the corridor.

Two things make the Pakenham estates harder on hedges than the older streets. The blocks sit on former farmland with almost no established canopy, so a screen copes with hot northerly wind on its exposed face in summer and full frost exposure on clear still nights in winter. And on a 350 to 400 square metre block the hedge is doing the privacy work that distance does elsewhere, so a gappy base is not a cosmetic problem. It is the reason the screen was planted failing.

If your screen needs a real cut back rather than a tidy, the honest answer is that late August into September will give you a better result than this week. We are happy to book it now and do it then.