What is leylandii

A.� Leylandii, or the Leyland Cypress, is the most popular hedging plant in Britain. It is a hybrid between the false and true Cypress tree and is extremely vigorous. This vigour and the ease with which it is propagated from cuttings made it extremely popular with nurserys during the last 30 years or so.

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A.� Essentially, the problem is that Leylandii would naturally be a forest tree, but here it is marketed as hedging for typically small suburban gardens.

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Most homeowners buy small plants, no more than a couple of feet high and think it should be relatively easy to keep them in check. This is where they go wrong. Leylandii grows at least three feet a year, and if you don't prune it hard back every year then it will soon get out of control, reaching 25-30 feet quite easily. It only takes one missed year and you've got a potential monster on your hands.

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A.� Yes. A Birmingham pensioner, Michael Jones, set up Hedgeline, after a six-and-a-half year fight to get his neighbour to cut down the 30ft Leylandii hedge which had plunged his house into darkness. Although they state that they campaign against all nuisance hedging, it is an unavoidable fact that well over 80 per cent of there 3,000 plus members are involved in disputes over Leyland Cypress.

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A. There was a Private Members Bill, sponsored by Labour MP Jim Cunningham, which got as far as a second reading in the House of Commons, but eventually fizzled out because of lack of Parliamentary time. The idea was to give local authorities the power to order householders to chop down Leylandii hedges by classing them as a statutory nuisance.

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A. It looks like a compromise has been reached by the Government's Building Research Establishment (BRE). They have worked out a formula to work out whether a hedge is a nuisance or not. It works like this. The householder measures the distance between a window and the hedge, dividing the result by two and adding 6ft 7in. If the real height of the hedge is higher than the resulting number, it's too high. Anything under that 6ft 7inch mark is exempt. The formula is now being studied by the government to see whether it should be adopted.

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