Planted hedges and mixes

A planted hedge is a line you draw on the plan that carries a real species mix, so a boundary is a specification rather than a green stripe — and it is drawn, measured and scheduled as a hedge.

Drawing a hedge and editing its mix are on every plan, and a design that already has hedges draws, measures and schedules them for everyone who opens it.

Drawing a hedge

Close the site boundary first, then open the Trees… list in the tools palette and choose 🌿 Hedge — draw a line. Click each point along the line and double-click, or press Enter, to finish; Esc abandons the run you are drawing. Afterwards it edits like any other boundary run: drag a point to move it, click the line to add one, Alt-click a point to remove it, Del deletes the run.

The first hedge you draw creates a style for you — a native mixed hedge of Crataegus monogyna, Prunus spinosa, Corylus avellana, Ilex aquifolium and Cornus sanguinea, in two rows at five plants a metre, left natural at 1.5 m. It needs the plant data to have loaded; on a device that has never had it, you are told to try again once you are online.

Opening the mix editor

Select the hedge and press 🎨 on the edit bar to open the fence-wall style designer, then 🌿 Edit hedge mix…. A hedge is a fence-wall style of type Hedge (planted), so it has no rails, piers or coping: its Height (m), Thickness (m), Material and Colour stay in the designer, and everything about the planting is in the mix editor. When the Planting panel is already open, selecting a hedge fills its Hedge section, where Edit mix… does the same and the Style list swaps the selected run onto a different hedge.

Species and shares

Each row of the mix is one species and its share. The button on the left of a row changes that species, + Add species adds a row, and ✕ removes one. Choosing a species that is already in the mix combines the two rows' shares instead of listing it twice.

The shares do not have to add up. The total line tells you when they will be saved scaled to 100 %, and Make 100 % normalises them for you. A species left at 0 % is not part of the saved mix.

How it is planted

• Rows - one, two or three staggered rows across the ribbon; two is the default.
• Plants/m - 0.5 to 12 plants a metre, per row. The plant count is the length times the rows times the plants per metre, rounded up, then split between the species by their shares.
• Stock - the hedging grades: bare-root hedging, rootballed hedging and instant-hedge troughs. One stock size serves the whole mix.
• Clipping - Managed or Natural. It changes the drawing: managed gives the ribbon a crisp double edge, natural a scalloped one.
• Height m - the target height, 0.3 to 8 m. The style's height follows it, so the hedge stands at that height in 3D too.
• Status - Proposed, Existing, Retained or Removed.

Save mix writes the style; Cancel leaves it alone. Whenever you are editing a hedge style that already exists, rather than making a new one, the editor says so — saving changes every hedge drawn with that style, however many that is.

Native share and species per 30 m

Two numbers describe the mix, under the fields and again on the Hedge section. Native is the share of the mix native to Great Britain, counting cultivars of native species. A species whose status is not in the plant data counts as neither native nor not, so the figure is reported as a floor — for example 85 % with 15 % unknown — rather than a guess.

Species per 30 m is how many species of the mix actually receive at least one plant in a 30 m length at the rows and spacing you have set; that is how hedgerow surveys count them. In the mix editor the number of plants in that 30 m is shown beside it. A species on a very small share can be listed in the mix and still not appear in the count.

Codes, schedules and Auto fences

Every hedge style takes the first free code — H1, H2 and so on. It heads the mix editor and is drawn once at the middle of each run in that style. Duplicating a style gives the copy its own code, so two different hedges are never both marked H1 on the plan.

Hedges appear in the wall and fence schedule as one row per style: an H reference, the style name, its height, and the total length of every run drawn with it. That reference numbers the schedule's own rows alongside the F, W and P ones, so it will not always match the style's H code. Hedge length is measured apart from fencing, and the PDF planning report lists it as Hedges.

🪵 Auto fences rebuilds every fence and wall from the plot layout, and 🪵 Clear fences only removes them; planted hedges survive both. Auto fences names the number it is keeping in the confirmation it asks before replacing the fences already on the plan, and Clear fences only says afterwards how many it kept. Because a hedge is a fence-wall style, the Style list on the edit bar will also turn an existing fence run into a hedge.