Laurus nobilis – Hedging (Common Bay)

Laurus nobilis makes a beautiful dense hedge for full sun to partial shade. It doesn’t mind being clipped and can be any size from a metre upwards.

The Laurus nobilis Family

A tree of antiquity, of emperors and conquerors and victors crowned with laurel leaves, of pots framing doorways, of kitchen gardens and cooks. Beautiful, fragrant, familiar and beloved. Simple shaped bright green young leaves turning dark as they mature. Yellow spring flowers and black seedy berries. Can be left wild as a large shrub or clipped, pruned and shaped. Deeply dark green, medium-textured evergreen low-maintenance shrubs for making hedges. Really good hedges. If these came in a tin, that’s what the tin would say. They come in pots and they’ve been carefully trained and selected for the job in hand. That means they are ideal for creating pretty ‘instant’ hedges. Naturally quite slow-growing, these well-grown plants are just the ticket for making a really dense and chunky screen, barrier or hedge that looks mature in no time. Sturdy- trunked and thickly-clothed in lateral branches all the way up, these will weave and knit together and create a wall of rich dark green. Perfect for Mediterranean style gardens, naturally, Laurus nobilis is suited to all gardens really and in hedge-form make some of the best backdrops for contrasting shrubs and trees. Happy to be clipped and trimmed, they can be kept very tight and neat and are excellent for privacy. The foliage is aromatic and on hot days will fill your garden with their spicy, earthy scent. My Italian neighbour ‘prunes’ the bits she can reach from her window and then brings me a dish of pollo cacciatore swimming in a rich sauce infused with the trimmings. Laurus nobilis grown this way are highly recommended. As are Italian neighbours but we don’t sell those.