In winter the prunings lie on the lawn and the first question is always the same: where do they go. Hire a shredder, order a skip, two loads to the recycling centre. But what is lying there is not waste, it is fencing material. Rods, poles, brushwood. Exactly what fences were made of before anyone had heard of welded mesh panels.
A natural fence is not a decorative project. It is the most obvious use for material that turns up anyway, and apart from your time it costs almost nothing. What it asks of you: that you know what each kind of wood does. Willow strikes root and turns into something living. Hazel stays dead and rots quietly. Brushwood between two rows of posts becomes a Benjes hedge and settles a little deeper every year.
One thing at a time: why the cutting season decides everything, how you weave around driven stakes, what a deadwood bank really achieves, and how long all of it lasts. Honestly counted, not talked up. Today, at the end of July · CW 31, is no time for building. It is time for planning: peg out the line, measure the length, write down which shrubs are due in winter.
At a glance
- Willow strikes root, and it does so reliably. Freshly cut rods in moist soil grow roots within weeks. That is the appeal of a living fence and at the same time the reason never to put one across drains, sewers or soakaways.
- You weave with sapless wood · CW 46 to 9. Between mid November and the end of February the sap is at rest, the rods bend instead of splitting, and the German closed season under § 39 has not begun yet.
- Hazel stays dead and lasts 5 to 10 years as a weave. Hazel poles never strike root, but in ground contact they are soft after 2 to 4 years. So the load bearing posts come from robinia, sweet chestnut or oak.
- A Benjes hedge is a bank, not a heap. Two rows of driven posts, with brushwood layered flat between them. It settles every single year and wants topping up.
- Height and boundary distance are decided at state level. A dead fence may sit on the boundary itself in many German states, and its height follows whatever is customary locally. As soon as the fence starts to shoot, it often counts as a hedge, and then planting distances apply. Talking to your neighbour before you build is cheaper than any court ruling.
The material is already growing in your garden
Add up what accumulates at your place over the winter. A single pollarded willow gives you anything from an armful to a whole barrow of rods, depending on the age of the tree. A hazel that needs thinning anyway hands you straight poles of two to four metres. Fruit tree prunings, dogwood, privet, anything straight enough will do for the filling of a deadwood hedge.
What you need sorts into three grades of wood, and the sorting decides what you can build.
Rods are supple, finger thick, 1.5 to 3 m long. Willow is king here, because it lays almost like wire. Hazel works too, but it is stiffer and snaps sooner.
Poles are straight, thumb to wrist thick. Hazel is the classic material because it grows straight of its own accord.
Posts are the one thing you may have to buy. They sit in the soil, under permanent attack from moisture and fungi. Robinia, sweet chestnut and oak last 15 to 25 years down there, hazel and spruce a great deal less.
Sort while you are cutting
Start three piles as you cut: crooked and thin, straight and thin, straight and stout. Sort everything onto one heap and you will be picking through it later in the wet with cold fingers, and you will end up using the wrong rod simply because it happened to be on top.
Willow: the fence that keeps growing
What makes willows special is how eagerly they root. A freshly cut rod, sharpened at an angle and pushed 30 to 50 cm into moist soil with the buds pointing up, puts out roots and leaves in spring. Through the first summer you water deeply once a week in dry spells, otherwise it leafs out and then dies again in July. Osier (Salix viminalis), white willow (Salix alba) and crack willow root reliably. Goat willow (Salix caprea) from the field edge is precisely the one that does not: nurseries graft it, because barely a handful out of a hundred cuttings ever takes.
That is how a living fence comes about. You push the rods in at opposing angles, weave the crossing points together and tie them loosely. What is a diamond lattice of bare sticks in the first year is a green wall by the third, thickening from the bottom up. It gets cut twice a year, otherwise you end up with a row of trees.
The same quality is the reason a living willow fence cannot go just anywhere. Willow roots look for water, and they find it. They grow into soakaways, land drains and old clay sewers until nothing gets through any more.
Settle the question of pipes and drains first
Before the first rod goes in: where is the land drain, where is the sewer, where is the soakaway? The council or the water utility usually holds the site plan. A living fence is only kept short at the top, underneath it carries on growing: on older stools willow roots reach 10 m and further, and they head straight for the moist, airy gravel packing around pipes. So over pipes, drains and old clay ware you do not build with living material at all, you use hazel or another dead construction. Where that is not an option, a root barrier belongs in between.
Cutting season: CW 46 to 9
There are two reasons to cut in winter, and both of them are binding.
The first is the wood itself. Between leaf fall and bud break the sap is at rest. The bark sits tight, the rod bends instead of bursting open, and the cut on the parent shrub dries off instead of bleeding. In practice that means from mid November · CW 46 to the end of February · CW 9, and 28 February is the hard stop. The rods are at their most supple in the weeks around the turn of the year.
The second reason is the law. In Germany § 39 paragraph 5 of the federal nature conservation act forbids cutting back or coppicing hedges, living fences, thickets and other woody plants from 1 March to 30 September. Gentle shaping and maintenance cuts stay allowed, but harvesting an armful of rods from your own shrub is anything but a shaping cut. Trees on horticulturally used land are exempt, so the pollarded willow in a domestic garden does not fall under the ban. If you would rather not rely on borderline cases, stay inside the winter window anyway, because hazel, privet and every hedge along the boundary very much do fall under it. Regardless of the season, § 44 applies to occupied nests and resting places, as does your local tree protection bylaw, which often requires a permit above a certain trunk girth. In Austria and Switzerland nature conservation sits with the states and cantons, with comparable closed seasons. The details are in pruning hedges: timing and bird protection.
If you cannot build until later, store the rods cool and shaded with their ends in water or in damp sand. If they have dried out and snap when you bend them, submerge them completely for three to seven days and they come back supple. They will no longer reliably shoot afterwards, which for a dead fence is no loss at all.
Hazel: poles that never shoot
If roots are the one thing you do not want, take hazel. Common hazel (Corylus avellana) shoots again from the stool after coppicing, but cut poles do not root. That makes it the material for everything that is meant to stay dead.
Hazel grows straight, splits astonishingly willingly under an axe and, freshly cut, is supple enough to weave. What it is not: durable. In ground contact hazel poles are soft after 2 to 4 years, which is why they never carry the load. Built dry and with a gap to the soil, a hazel weave lasts 5 to 10 years.
Hence the division of labour you find in every old fence: durable wood stands in the soil, available wood lies on top. The hazel itself wants coppicing every 8 to 12 years for that. In the long run it rejuvenates the shrub, but after a clear cut it will not fruit again for three or four years. If you want nuts as well as poles, rejuvenate in stages and take out a third of the oldest stems each year. How that fits together is in hazelnuts in the garden: pollination, pruning, harvest.
The pattern is the whole trick
In front of this stake, behind the next, in front of the third. The rod clamps itself the moment it has two changes behind it, which is why it needs neither nail nor wire. That is exactly what makes a woven fence repairable: whatever has gone soft, you pull out and replace one piece at a time.
The only thing that matters is that the next rod starts somewhere else. If every rod begins at the same stake, you build a vertical weak point there, and that is where the fence later gapes open.
Weaving around driven posts
The classic woven fence, the wattle hurdle, works without a single screw. It consists of upright stakes in the ground and rods woven horizontally through them. A 40 cm bed edging takes you an afternoon; 15 m of screening is more like two weekends.
Peg out the line and settle on a height
Run a string, measure the length, decide the height. For a bed edging 30 to 50 cm is plenty. As screening it becomes 1.20 m to 1.80 m, and from that height on neighbour law starts to matter.
Set the posts
The end posts and an intermediate post every 2 to 3 m, all of durable wood, 60 to 80 cm into the ground. These posts carry the load when the fence moves in the wind.
Drive in the stakes
Between the posts the stakes go in at 40 to 60 cm spacing. Sharpen the ends, drive them 30 to 50 cm deep with a sledgehammer and a block of wood as a buffer so the head does not split. Closer than 40 cm is unnecessary, wider than 60 cm gives you a slack weave.
Lay the first rod
Start right at the bottom, thick end first, alternately in front of and behind the stakes. At the end post take the rod once around the post and weave it back the other way. The lowest rod stays 5 to 10 cm clear of the ground, otherwise it is the first thing to rot. Close the gap underneath with a strip of gravel or grit. A short wooden peg through a stake, or a tie of willow rod, is enough to stop the rows above sliding down.
Row after row, working upwards
Every new rod starts at a different stake from the one before, so the joins move along. After every four or five rows, knock the weave down with the flat of your hand or a piece of split log so it settles and closes up.
Finish the top
Weave the last two rows in especially tightly and knock them down hard. Leave the stakes standing proud at first and only saw them off flush with the top rod once the weave has settled for a few weeks. If you like, lay a thicker rod along the top as a capping band and tie it down with willow.
Freshly woven is always too loose
A woven fence is never as dense on the day you build it as it will be later. The wood shrinks as it dries and the weave sinks. Allow 10 to 15 % loss of height and weave one row more rather than one row less. Topping up only works while the stakes still stand proud, which is why you saw them off a few weeks later. Pushing rods in from below never works at all.
The stake fence is the simpler option
If weaving feels like too much fiddling: stakes upright in the ground, two or three horizontal rails across them, tied on with wire or willow bands. That is done in a third of the time and lasts just as long, because it is the same wood in the same place.
It looks quieter and more rural, and it lets the wind through, which on an exposed plot is an advantage. What you will not get out of it is dense screening. For that you let ivy or hops climb it. Hops are summer screening only and die back over winter. Ivy stays evergreen but holds moisture against the wood and grows heavy over the years, so it is better off on its own frame behind the fence than in the weave itself.
The Benjes hedge: a bank rather than a heap
In the 1980s Hermann Benjes argued for laying brushwood in a line instead of shredding it. The idea is simple: birds perch in the branches, drop seeds while they are there, and over the years a real hedge grows out of the bank. Whether that works depends on what is fruiting in the surroundings. With no bird hedge nearby, very little happens on its own. Then you plant a dozen native shrubs alongside and give the bank a push that way.
What separates a Benjes hedge from a brash pile is the guidance. Two rows of driven posts keep the material on the line so it does not spread sideways. That way it looks tidy and works as a boundary.
This is how you build one. Two parallel rows of posts, 50 to 80 cm apart as a narrow boundary bank, better 1.5 to 2 m if it is meant to offer nesting and cover. Along the run a post every 1 to 1.5 m, each driven 30 to 50 cm deep and standing about 1.20 m above ground. Then layer the brushwood in flat, heavy wood at the bottom, fine twigs on top. Do not throw it, lay it: the bank ends up markedly more compact when the branches all point the same way.
And then be patient. A Benjes hedge settles visibly in its first year, often by a quarter to a third of its height. That is not a fault, that is the decay that turns it into habitat. Top it up once a year, in October · CW 40 to 44, before the hedgehogs move in. Beyond that it needs no care. What that looks like in detail, and what grows in, is in creating a deadwood corner and Benjes hedge.
What lives in a natural fence
The ecological value is not a side effect you mention afterwards to justify the project. It is the reason a soft, half rotten woven fence beats a brand new plastic one.
Residents you can count on
- Beetle larvae in the softening wood
As soon as hazel poles go soft, wood dwelling beetles move in. Their larvae eat their way through the wood for years and are in turn food for woodpeckers and tits.
- Solitary bees in old borings and stems
Abandoned beetle galleries in dry wood are sought after nest sites for mason bees and their relatives. An old fence quietly delivers what a shop bought bee hotel promises.
- Hedgehogs and shrews at the foot of the bank
Down in the bank, where leaves and fine twigs collect, a still cavity forms that is sheltered from persistent rain and where frost only arrives much weakened. That is exactly where hedgehogs overwinter. Which is why a Benjes hedge never gets raked.
- Wrens and robins in the brushwood
Both nest close to the ground in thorny or tangled material. A generously built deadwood bank of 1.5 to 2 m replaces a piece of woodland edge that a garden otherwise lacks.
- Slow worms and lizards, each on their own side
Lizards want the warm, south facing flank as a sunning spot. Slow worms are active at dusk and want the damp, shaded side with leaf litter and flat pieces of wood or stone to slip under. Getting both into one bank is the trick.
If you want to build on that deliberately, combine the fence with a dry stone wall as habitat or plant a bird hedge of native shrubs behind it. The underlying thought is the same as with a wildlife garden: allow structures that do not look immaculate.
The durable wood stands in the soil, the wood that grows back lies on top. Swap the two and you will be starting again from the bottom after two winters.
Service life, honestly counted
A hazel weave on robinia posts has gone soft in its bottom rows after 4 to 6 years, and after 8 to 10 years it is at the point where you renew it row by row. A living willow fence lasts indefinitely in theory, but it demands cutting twice a year, and skip two summers and you own a row of trees. A Benjes hedge is never finished, which is why it is never broken either.
That is not a bad balance when you set it against what the material cost. It is a different balance from a bought fence, though. A natural fence is not maintenance free, it is repairable. The difference matters.
In practice that means walking the woven fence once a year in late winter, pulling out soft rods, weaving fresh ones in, driving wobbly stakes back down. On 10 m of fence that is two hours. Skip that round and after three years you no longer have a repair job, you have a rebuild.
The deadwood bank runs on a different calendar. Hedgehogs sleep in there from November until the end of March, from 1 March the nesting season is added, and § 44 of the German nature conservation act protects resting and breeding sites regardless of any cutting season. So rebuilding, compacting and topping up belong in October · CW 40 to 44.
Cut your spare rods at the same time
Every year, cut one bundle of rods more than you need and store it upright in the shade behind the shed. Then the next repair round finds exactly the material you want already waiting, and you are not out hunting for rods in the middle of February.
Neighbour law: distance and height
The moment the fence sits on the boundary or grows above head height, a bit of handiwork turns into a legal question. And in Germany that question is not answered nationally but in the neighbour law acts of the individual states. Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern have no neighbour law act of their own; in Bavaria a few provisions sit in the AGBGB, otherwise the civil code and local bylaws apply.
There are two things to keep apart before the first rod goes down. With a dead boundary structure it is less about distance than about height: in many states it may stand on the boundary itself, but it has to match what is customary locally. Where nothing customary can be established, North Rhine-Westphalia names a fence of about 1.20 m as its fallback; the widely quoted 1.20 m to 1.80 m is practice, not statute. Build higher and you need your neighbour's consent, and above a height fixed in state law the building regulations or the local development plan have a say too. As soon as the fence counts as a hedge or woody planting, planting distances apply instead, in North Rhine-Westphalia under § 42 of the neighbour law act 0.50 m up to a height of 2 m and 1 m above that; other states do the sums differently. In Austria private neighbour law sits in the ABGB (§§ 364 ff. and § 422), while the height and construction of boundary structures follow the state building regulations and development plans. In Switzerland the civil code applies (Art. 684 and 687 f.), with cantons and municipalities filling in the planting distances.
A living fence often counts as a hedge, not a fence
Worth knowing about a willow fence: as soon as it shoots and grows, many state rules stop treating it as a boundary structure and treat it as a hedge or woody planting instead. That brings different, usually larger boundary distances and a duty to keep it to height. A dead woven fence, by contrast, stays a fence. If you want to build right on the boundary, the dead construction is the legally simpler road.
The cheapest route is still the direct one: show your neighbour what you are planning before you build and ask whether they can live with it. A natural fence is a conversation starter anyway. If you are building on an allotment, check the site rules as well, because they are often stricter than state law. What applies there is in the German allotment act: what applies on an allotment.
A natural fence is something you read over years. The first winter it stands there bare, by the third summer blackberry is growing through it and the Benjes hedge has sunk by a hand's breadth. That is precisely the part nobody keeps in their head. Note in your garden diary when you wove it, which shrub the rods came from and how high the bank stood on the day you built it. When you renew that first row five years from now, you will know exactly how long your wood really lasted in that spot. And the annual repair round in late winter is a recurring task you can set up once and then be reminded of by itself.
Common questions
When should I cut willow rods?
Between mid November · CW 46 and the end of February · CW 9, while the wood is sapless. The bark sits tight then, the rod bends instead of splintering, and the parent shrub takes the cut best. In Germany coppicing hedges and thickets is forbidden from 1 March to 30 September anyway, so 28 February is your cut off. The rods are at their most supple in the weeks around the turn of the year.
Does a willow fence always shoot?
Nearly always, if you use freshly cut rods of osier, white willow or crack willow and the soil is moist. Goat willow is the exception, barely any of its cuttings take. If you want no growth at all, use hazel, because cut hazel poles do not root. Willow rods stored dry for months usually stop shooting, but that is not something to rely on.
How long does a hazel fence last?
In ground contact hazel poles are soft after 2 to 4 years, faster on permanently wet sites. Built dry and clear of the soil, the weave lasts 5 to 10 years. That is why the load bearing posts are robinia, sweet chestnut or oak, which manage 15 to 25 years in the ground, and only the weaving is hazel. Individual soft rods you pull out and replace without taking the fence down.
How high may my fence to the neighbour be?
In Germany that is set by the neighbour law acts of the states, not by federal law. A dead boundary structure has to match local custom and may in many places sit on the boundary; where nothing customary can be established, North Rhine-Westphalia names about 1.20 m. Build higher and you need consent, and above a certain height the state building regulations weigh in. A willow fence that shoots often counts as a hedge, which adds a boundary distance, in North Rhine-Westphalia 0.50 m up to 2 m of height and 1 m above that. In Austria private neighbour law sits in the ABGB and boundary structures in the state building regulations; in Switzerland the civil code applies with cantonal planting distances. When in doubt ask the council, it costs nothing.
Does a hedge really grow in a Benjes hedge?
Sometimes, but not by itself and not quickly. The bank picks up growth when birds perch in it and drop seeds, and when there are native shrubs fruiting anywhere nearby. On cleared new build estates nothing happens for years. More reliable is to plant a dozen native shrubs such as dogwood, blackthorn or dog rose right alongside and use the deadwood bank as shelter for the young plants.
Can I use fruit tree prunings for the Benjes hedge?
Yes, healthy fruit tree prunings are good filling material and there is plenty of it about in winter. The exception is material from diseased trees: shoots with brown rot dieback, scorched looking shoots after suspected fireblight, or wood badly hit by scab do not belong in a garden hedge, because fungal spores such as brown rot and scab persist there and, with fireblight, the bacteria stay infectious for months in the bark ooze. Wood like that goes in the general waste or wherever your local plant health service directs, and with suspected fireblight you ask them first. Burning is not a default answer, it is banned almost everywhere and only allowed with a local exemption.
Sources and further reading
- Creating a deadwood corner and Benjes hedge · the structure, siting and colonisation of a deadwood bank in detail
- Hazelnuts in the garden: pollination, pruning, harvest · how to prune the shrub so it delivers poles as well as nuts
- Pruning hedges: timing and bird protection · the closed seasons under the German nature conservation act and what stays allowed in the nesting season
- Planting a bird hedge of native shrubs · species choice for planting behind or into a Benjes hedge
- Starting a wildlife garden · the larger frame a natural fence belongs in
- Building a dry stone wall as habitat · the second structure that draws in reptiles and solitary bees
- The German allotment act: what applies on an allotment · site rules and boundary structures in an allotment colony
- German federal nature conservation act § 39 paragraph 5, ban on cutting hedges and woody plants from 1 March to 30 September, with the exemption for trees on horticulturally used land
- German federal nature conservation act § 44, year round protection of breeding and resting sites
- Neighbour law act of North Rhine-Westphalia § 35 (nature of the boundary structure) and § 42 (boundary distances for hedges); in Bavaria AGBGB articles 43 ff.
- Austria ABGB §§ 364 ff. and § 422, Switzerland ZGB articles 684 and 687 f.
On the legal part
The figures on boundary distance, fence height and cutting seasons are orientation, not legal advice. In Germany neighbour law is state law, in Austria private neighbour law sits in the ABGB while boundary structures follow the state building regulations, and in Switzerland the civil code applies with cantonal planting distances; municipal bylaws, development plans, tree protection bylaws and allotment rules can all be stricter. Establish the figures that apply to your plot before you build, with your council, the building authority or your allotment association.
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