Lifting a hawthorn from a friend's hedge, and doing it lawfully
Three of the best trees on my balcony started life in a garden hedge that had been clipped flat every August for about thirty years. This is how they came out of the ground in the February of 2021, what the law and plain manners required before a spade went in, and what the first season afterwards looked like.
Written 23 February 2025 · looked at again 8 June 2025 · 8 minute read
Asking before digging
The first thing to say about collecting trees in Britain is that you need the landowner's permission, every time. Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act it is an offence for anyone other than the owner, or someone they have authorised, to uproot a wild plant, and that includes the hawthorn on a field edge or a verge that looks as though nobody could possibly care about it. Someone does own that verge, and quite often a council or a farmer cares a good deal. I do not collect from the countryside at all.
My trees came from a friend who lives further out, where the suburbs start to thin, and who had decided to replace an old mixed hedge along the side of her garden with a fence. The hedge was mostly hawthorn, with some field maple and a little blackthorn, and it had been clipped hard for decades. She had already arranged for someone to grub it out. When I asked whether I could take a few of the plants first, she was glad of the help and of the idea that some of it would carry on somewhere.
Even with permission, I asked her to walk the hedge with me and point out which plants she wanted gone and which she wanted left as a screen until the fence went up. It took twenty minutes and saved an awkward conversation later. I also checked for nesting birds, which is the other legal point anyone working in a hedge needs to keep in mind. In late February there were none, but the timing was deliberate, and it would have been a very different job in April.
On the potting bench
- Clear permission from the owner, every time
- Nothing from verges, field edges, parks or common land
- Check for active nests before disturbing any hedge
- Agree which plants are coming out before you start
Choosing the time and the tree
Hawthorn is best lifted in late winter, when it is fully dormant but the worst of the frosts are nearly over, and before the buds begin to swell. In the south-east that usually means the second half of February or the first fortnight of March. Lifted then, the tree has a few weeks to settle before it has to push new roots and leaves, and the whole growing season ahead in which to recover. Lifted in autumn, it sits in cold wet compost all winter with a damaged root system, which is where I have lost trees before.
Choosing which plants to take was harder than digging them. An old clipped hedge produces trees with thick, gnarled bases and a mass of twigs at the top, which is promising, but many of them are fused to their neighbours or have one root heading straight down under the boundary. I looked for plants with a trunk that tapered, some movement in the lower third, and a root flare I could feel with my fingers at soil level. Of about fifteen hawthorns in the hedge I took three, and I would take fewer next time.
The field maples in the same hedge were tempting, but they had grown up tangled with the hawthorn and most had only one decent side. I took one as an experiment and left the rest. The blackthorn I left alone entirely, partly because it suckers so freely that I could see it would be difficult to separate a single plant, and partly because I did not fancy an afternoon of thorns in the wrists on top of everything else.
Getting it out of the ground
I started by cutting each tree back hard, to a stump of about forty centimetres with a few side branches, so that I could see what I was doing and so that the roots would have less to support afterwards. Then I dug a trench in a circle about thirty centimetres out from the trunk, cutting cleanly through the roots I met with a sharp spade and a pruning saw rather than tearing them. Hawthorn roots are tough and fibrous close to the trunk, and there were more fine ones inside that circle than I had expected.
The tap root was the last thing holding each tree, and on two of the three it went down further than I wanted to dig. I cut it with the saw as low as I could reach, then rocked the root ball gently out, keeping as much of the original soil around the fine roots as it would hold. Each one went straight onto a plastic sheet, wrapped tight and kept damp, and all three were in pots on the balcony within about four hours of the first cut.
The pots were ordinary deep plastic ones rather than bonsai containers, filled with a free-draining mix of grit, fine bark and a little of the old garden soil to carry over whatever fungi were living on the roots. I sat each tree slightly high, tied it firmly to its pot with string through the drainage holes so that the wind could not rock it, and watered it thoroughly once. Then I made myself leave them alone, which was the hardest part of the day.
On the potting bench
- Cut the top back hard before digging
- Trench round at a generous radius, cutting roots cleanly
- Keep the root ball wrapped and damp
- Pot the same day and tie the tree in against the wind
The first season, and the patience it needs
All three hawthorns sat still until the middle of April and then broke bud within a few days of each other, which was a relief I had not quite let myself expect. New shoots on a freshly collected tree are drawing on stored energy rather than new roots, and the temptation is to treat them as a sign that all is well and start work. I did not prune, wire or feed them that first year beyond a weak liquid feed from June, and I let every shoot grow as long as it wanted to.
The field maple was slower and gave me three weeks of worry before its buds opened in May. It lost one of its two main branches over the summer, which I later traced to a root I had cut too close on that side. The hawthorns kept going, and by August the strongest had shoots nearly a metre long, which looks terrible on a balcony and is exactly what a recovering tree should be doing. Long shoots mean new roots underneath, and in the first year new roots are the only thing that matters.
I would not touch a collected hawthorn for styling until its second or even third spring, and then only once I could see strong growth right across the tree. The trunks I brought home that February are still the best material I have, far better than anything I could have grown from seed in the same time, and I owe that to an old hedge and a friend who asked whether I wanted any of it before the fence went in.
Written on a south-west facing balcony in Twickenham, south-west London. What works here may need adjusting for a colder garden or a shadier ledge.