Guides · Boundary hedges

Who owns a shared boundary hedge, and who pays to cut it?

A hedge growing exactly on the boundary line between two gardens is legally the joint property of both owners, in the same way a party wall is. Neither side can cut it back to nothing without agreement, and in practice most disputes come from one side just doing it anyway.

How to tell if it's actually a shared hedge

Check your title deeds first, they sometimes show which side of the boundary the hedge sits on, or note it as a party feature. If the hedge is planted a little way inside one garden, it usually belongs to that owner alone, whatever the other side might assume. If it's genuinely on the line, it's shared.

The conversation that avoids a dispute

Before booking any work on a shared hedge, tell your neighbour what you're planning, roughly when, and who's paying. Most disagreements we've seen locally started because one side just had it cut without saying anything, not because of a real disagreement about the work itself.

If you can't agree

For routine trimming there's no legal mechanism to force a neighbour to contribute or to stop them objecting to a cut on their side of a shared hedge. If it's a genuine deadlock, the practical answer is usually to cut your own side back to the boundary line and leave theirs, which is within your rights on a shared hedge.

Next: what the law actually says about hedge height  →