You’ve spent a Saturday trimming the laurel, it looked great, and a week later the whole hedge has a brown, crispy edge. It’s one of the most common laurel complaints there is, and in most cases the hedge is perfectly healthy. What you’re seeing is the price of cutting a plant with very big leaves.
Sliced leaves
A hedge trimmer doesn’t care where the leaves are. It cuts straight through them, so after a trim the outside of a cherry laurel hedge is covered in half-leaves. The cut edges dry out and turn brown within a week or two. Nothing is spreading and nothing is dying. Each of those leaves just has a dead edge where it was cut.
Left alone, the brown edges get covered by new growth. After a trim in late spring or early summer that takes a few weeks. After a trim in late summer the new growth is slower, and you may be looking at brown edges until the following spring.
How to avoid it
- On a smaller hedge, use secateurs and cut each stem just above a leaf. It takes longer, but there are no sliced leaves and the hedge looks finished the day you do it.
- Keep the trimmer sharp. Blunt or gummed-up blades tear and crush leaves, which brown much worse than a clean cut, so clean off the sap and oil the blades after each use.
- Do the main cut soon after the spring flush has firmed up, so the summer growth hides the cut edges quickly.
- After a trimmer cut, go along the side people actually look at and pick or snip out the worst half-leaves. It takes half an hour and the hedge looks far better for it.
Portuguese laurel has smaller leaves and shows this far less, which is why it’s so often chosen for formal, clipped hedges.
Scorch after a heavy cut
If brown patches appear a few days after you’ve cut a hedge back hard in hot weather, it’s probably sun scorch. Leaves that have spent years in the shade inside the hedge are suddenly in full sun, and they can’t cope. They go pale, then brown and papery.
Avoid heavy cuts during heatwaves and do them in early spring instead. If it’s already happened, water the hedge well and wait. The scorched leaves will drop and new ones will replace them.
Frost on late regrowth
Trim laurel in late September or October and it often puts out a flush of soft new shoots. These don’t have time to toughen up before the frosts, and they get blackened or browned over winter. That’s why we always say to stop trimming by September.
The damage looks bad in February but rarely goes further than the soft tips. Cut them back to healthy growth in late spring.
Trimming in the rain
Cut leaves are open wounds. Trim in wet weather and you give leaf-spot infections an easy way in, especially if the trimmer has just been used on another hedge. The result is brown, spotty dieback around the cuts and, later, holes in the leaves. Our guide to holes in laurel leaves has more on this. Pick a dry, overcast day for trimming, and wipe the blades with disinfectant if you’re doing more than one hedge.
Is the brown part dead?
Scratch the bark on a brown shoot gently with your thumbnail. Green underneath means it’s alive and will usually reshoot. Brown and dry means that bit has died. Don’t rush to cut things out in winter, though. Wait until late spring, when new buds make it obvious what’s alive.
After a hard prune
If you’ve cut an overgrown laurel right back to bare stems, a few weeks of brown stumps is normal. New buds break from the old wood, usually within a few weeks in spring, though it can take longer on very old stems. Water it in dry spells and give it a feed. Our guide to cutting back an overgrown laurel hedge explains what to expect.
A quick checklist for next time
- Trim between late spring and late summer, and stop by September.
- Pick a dry, overcast day.
- Use sharp, clean blades, or secateurs on short runs.
- Check for nesting birds before you start.
- Tidy up the most visible half-leaves afterwards.
For more on tools, see our guides to the best hedge trimmers for laurel and the best secateurs and shears.
