On Friday I took the bins out and had to look properly at something I have walked past twice a day for ten years. It had got away from me, and it had also, quietly, become one of the best things I have ever planted. Tomorrow evening, weather permitting, I go up a ladder and deal with it.

"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

(7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

Friday, and the bins. It is the least poetic job in the week and I do it half asleep, wheeling the thing down the front path without looking at anything in particular. This time I looked. The yew along the front of the house had gone shaggy while I was busy elsewhere. Not overgrown in any dramatic way, just soft at the edges; this year's growth standing out past the line in lighter green tufts, the whole face of it blurred, like a haircut three weeks past its best.

I stood there with the bin for longer than I needed to.

I had not noticed it happening. That is the honest part. I have walked past this hedge every single day since the spring, carrying watering cans to other things through the drought, and it had simply got on with growing without asking me for anything. The only reason I saw it on Friday is that the bin was in my hands and there was nothing else to look at.

And then, stood there, I started to remember what it used to be.

Thirty centimetres

Ten years ago I planted this hedge from a row of small yews, each about thirty centimetres tall. Knee height would be generous. I dug them into the clay along the front of the garden and the side between us and next door, and when I stepped back to admire the job there was nothing much to admire. A dotted line of dark green with bare soil between. You could have stepped over any of it without breaking stride.

Yew has a reputation for being slow, and in those first couple of years it earned it. It spends its early seasons putting its effort underground, getting its roots into the ground before it commits to much above it. I remember thinking I had planted something for the next owners of the house.

The hedge is about as old as Olivia. I had not put those two things together until Friday.

Now it is six feet tall and three feet deep. Fifteen feet of it runs along the front and another eighteen down the side against the neighbours' garden. It is a proper wall of dark green, and it does the thing I planted it for without me ever noticing it doing it. Before it, anyone walking past on the pavement could look straight into our front window. Now they cannot. I had stopped thinking of that as something the hedge does. It is just how the house is.

That is what good structure does in a garden. It becomes invisible precisely by working.

Why September

So the hedge needs cutting, and September is the time to do it.

Yew is one of the easiest hedges to keep, because once it is established it really only wants one good trim a year. Late summer into early autumn is the window. By now the birds have finished nesting, the flush of new growth has slowed, and a cut made this month will barely have grown back by the time the cold arrives. The hedge more or less stops for winter. It will not put on anything worth mentioning until the spring.

Which means something I had not properly thought about until this week.

Whatever I cut now is what I will look at until May.

If the top goes wavy, it stays wavy through the whole of the dark months. If I rush the far end because the light is going, the far end will be rushed every morning I walk the kids down the path, every Friday I take the bins out, all the way through to spring. The hedge will not correct it and it will not grow over it. It will hold the line I give it, patiently and exactly, for about eight months.

That is a strange sort of responsibility for one evening's work.

Tomorrow evening

The plan is tomorrow, straight after work, if the weather holds. The forecast says it will: dry and warm, somewhere in the low twenties. The petrol trimmer is in the shed, and the folding ladders that open out into a small platform are in the van ready to come out.

The light is the thing I will be racing. Last Thursday I wrote to you about the day and the night coming level; that happens this week, in the small hours of Wednesday. So I will be up a ladder on the eve of the equinox, with thirty-three feet of hedge in front of me and a sun that is not going to wait for me to finish.

I know exactly how this usually goes. I start carefully. By the second half I am tired, the trimmer is heavy, the light is going orange, and I start taking bigger passes to get it done. And then I spend the winter looking at the second half.

So this year I am going to try something. About halfway along the front, I am going to stop, climb down, stand on the pavement, and look back at what I have done before I go any further. Not because I am a patient man. I am not, and anyone who has watched me try to get two children out of the door in the morning will tell you so. It is because of that thought about May. Every pass of the trimmer is going to be looked at for months.

We do not often get that kind of warning in the rest of life. We do not usually know which of our decisions is the one that sets the shape for a whole season. We make them tired, at the end of a working day, with the light going, and then we live inside them for months.

The garden, just occasionally, tells you in advance.

The end of season tidy

I think this is what the autumn tidy actually is, underneath the jobs.

It is not about making the garden perfect. The hedge will not be perfect on Tuesday night and it was never going to be. It is about deciding, while you still can, what shape you are willing to live with through the dark. The bed you clear or leave. The pots you bring in. The line you cut on the hedge. After this, for a good while, the garden stops changing, and you are left looking at the last decisions you made before it stopped.

There is a gentle kind of melancholy in that, and I do not want to rush past it. Every cut is one fewer cut left. I have done this job on this hedge eight or nine times now, and I will do it another few dozen if I am lucky, and at some point someone else will be up that ladder. The hedge will outlast all of us; yew does that.

But I find something steadying in it too. The line holds. Whatever else the winter does, the hedge will be standing there in January with whatever edge I give it on a warm Tuesday in September. It is one thing, at least, that I get to settle before the dark comes in.

If you are cutting yours

Practical, because some of you will have a hedge doing exactly what mine is doing.

Cut it now, while you can. Late August into September is right for yew, and for most formal hedges. Have a proper look inside before you start, just in case there is a late nest; by now there almost never is.

Cut it wider at the bottom than the top. This is the one that matters most over the years. A slight slope on each face, what the old books call a batter, lets light reach the base. A hedge cut straight up, or wider at the top, slowly goes bare at the bottom because the lower branches sit in its own shade.

Do the sides first and the top last. And for the top, a taut string line between two canes is worth ten minutes of setting up. Your eye will lie to you after half an hour on a ladder.

Take off this year's growth, not more. Cut back to just outside last year's line and the hedge keeps its size. Yew is unusually forgiving; unlike most conifers it will regrow from old brown wood, so an overgrown one can be cut back hard. But do that in stages, one face a year, not all at once.

Be sensible on the ladder. Firm, level ground; move the ladder rather than stretch; both hands on the trimmer. A petrol trimmer at arm's length at head height is not the place to be brave.

Lay a sheet down before you start, and wear gloves. Every part of yew is poisonous except the flesh of the red berries, and even the seed inside those is not. Clear the clippings up the same day if you have children or pets around, and do not leave them anywhere livestock can reach.

And then there is the base of the hedge, which I will not get to tomorrow. Ten years of dropped needles and whatever blew in are sat underneath it, and that dark strip of clay at the bottom is heading into winter with nothing done to it. On Thursday I will tell you how the cut went, whether I kept my promise about stopping halfway, and what I am planning for the bottom of it. You will probably be able to do yours on the same weekend.

Growth Shows at the Edges. The hedge had been growing all year and I only saw it on the morning I had nothing else in my hands. Most of what changes around us does it the same way, quietly, while we are carrying water to something else. It is worth stopping occasionally at the end of the path and looking back at what has been getting on without you.

Cut the Line You Want to Live With. A September cut on a yew holds until spring, which turns one tired evening's work into eight months of looking at the result. Not every decision comes with that warning. When one does, climb down, stand on the pavement, and look back before you finish.

The Shape Holds Through the Dark. Ten years ago this was a row of thirty-centimetre plants in bare clay that I could step over. Now it holds its line through the whole of winter without being asked. Whatever you settle before the dark comes in will still be there when the light returns, and in spring it will grow again, and you will get another go.

Gary Stewart writes twice a week from a small garden and an allotment on Norfolk clay.

Mondays are for what the garden has already done. Thursdays are shorter, because the weekend is the point and the reading is not.

No expertise, no ideal garden, just what the soil taught him that week.

Written slowly, at the speed of the garden.