Pruning a tall hedge? Choose the right scaffold.

A tall hedge almost never stands in an open field. There is a border running alongside it, a shed at the end of it, or the hedge forms the boundary with a path barely a metre wide. That is why this job points to the Altrex RS TOWER 51, a model only 75 cm across. At that width you get through a garden gate, between the hedge and a fence, and over a strip of lawn where a broader frame would be wedged. What else stands ready is listed under mobile scaffolds for hire.

Up on the deck you barely notice how slim it is. Trimming is sideways work, with a cutter bar you deliberately keep away from your body, and almost nothing ends up lying on the platform. What does count here is the deck length of 245 cm, because that is how much hedge you finish per set up. Going wider changes nothing about your reach and only means carrying more frames and boards down the garden to the far end.

Only with two people on the deck at once, or if you would rather catch the clippings in trugs than let them fall, does the RS52 with its 135 cm deck become a serious option. Weigh that against your garden: a wider build pushes harder across grass and wants more clear ground on both sides. The two footprints are set side by side in the overview of tower dimensions. For a hedge, then, choose on access and weight rather than on deck area.

The highest point on hedge work is not the crown itself but the plane above it that you still want to cut level. So you have to look down onto it and swing the cutter bar horizontally. For greenery of four to six metres that means a working height between 6 and 8 metres. Working height is nothing more than your platform height with the good two metres of reach you keep above it while standing. See also what eight metres delivers in practice.

Your measurement starts under the wheels, and in a garden that level rarely matches the terrace. If the hedge sits on a raised border, or the lawn falls away towards a ditch, you begin half a metre lower and need more frames to make it up. Take the hedge at three or four points along its length as well. On the sunny side it grows faster, and it is that tallest stretch which decides the build you specify at the rental stage.

Pick too tight and you will read it back in the greenery afterwards. Standing slightly low, you cut the crown from underneath with no sight of the line, the top goes convex, and the next trim has to put it right again. Going roomier mainly costs you build time and a few more parts to carry through the garden. If you sit exactly between two builds, compare them calmly on the page listing every working height first.

There is no facade here, so the tower draws its stability entirely from itself. All four stabilisers go out, evenly and as far as the garden allows, including on the side where the greenery is. That is precisely the one people leave half retracted, because the branches seem to be in the way. Take a hand shear to the lowest branches first and cut a pocket out, so the foot can reach the ground. Support from the hedge itself is not something you get.

The ground is the second point. Grass, soil and a freshly dug border give way as soon as the weight rests on four small points, and after a wet week that goes further than you expect. Lay stout boards or spreader plates under the wheels and under the foot plates, so the pressure is shared over a larger area. Walk the run beforehand for molehills, tree roots and sunken slabs. How to deal with that is covered under working on uneven ground.

Then account for everything else a garden holds. On the hedge side you cannot step back, so your working room has to be on the other side: that is where you walk, rake and push. Move garden furniture, planters, the airer and the trampoline out over the whole length you are tackling those days, not only at the first set up. A pond edge or an inspection cover hidden under the grass is exactly where no stabiliser belongs.

Work your rental period out in set ups rather than in metres. Each time you deal with a shade under two and a half metres of hedge, and the trimming, the raking and the shunt along are all inside that figure. In practice half an hour to three quarters goes into one set up. Fifteen metres of hedge therefore fills most of a day before you have counted the build at all. For a garden with a long boundary you land on two to three rental days.

What stretches the period further is not the cutting but the clearing away. Fifteen metres of tall hedge yields more green than a barrow will hold, and while that heap lies beside the run you cannot take the tower anywhere. Make sure the skip or the trailer is standing there on the same days. Weather plays in too: on a wet hedge the blade slides off, the clippings stick to the deck boards, and raking turns into heavy going.

Planning generously costs little on this job. The tariff does not climb evenly: after the first twenty four hours, every further rental day comes with 95 per cent off. A spare day for a shower or for that last stretch of hedge barely shows on the bill, whereas booking too short leaves you half finished and waiting for the van to pull up. What the various periods come to is shown on the page with our rental price list, before you fix the dates.

On a deck of 245 cm you get a good two metres of hedge done per set up. Take the top over that full length first and only then the flank, otherwise everything you cut off above lands on a face you have just finished. Work to a line you have strung rather than by eye, because from the platform you are looking at it from so close that every bulge reads as flat. That is the only way the crown stays at one height along the whole hedge.

Moving on begins at ground level. Everything you cut drops straight down, precisely where the wheels have to pass next. So rake the strip clear first, because a single thick branch under a wheel makes the tower slew away sideways, and you feel that only once you are already pushing at it. Then retract the stabilisers, roll the build exactly one deck length on, and put every one of them back down before you climb again.

Take up only what you can hold in your hands: the trimmer, gloves and a small saw for the thicker stems. Anything forgotten means a descent, and that is soon three times over per set up. The number of moves is nearly always pitched too low. A hedge running round a back garden is thirty metres, so twelve set ups. If it is greenery climbing up the brickwork instead, the approach is a different one.

You do not receive the mobile scaffold in one piece but as a stack of loose parts, complete and counted. The van stops at the street, so work out in advance where that stack lands and how you get it to the back. On a drive or a paved path such a stack sits fine; the run along the hedge does not, because there you want to build and shunt straight away. Anything with us before 15:00 on a working day goes out the following day.

You decide yourself which morning the set arrives in the garden and which day it leaves again, and on garden work you let that hang on the forecast and on your days off. Have the parts come the day before your first day of cutting, and you are up on the deck the next morning. Putting it together falls to you, manual and instruction film to hand; between two of you that is half a day, certainly when it all has to go through a narrow gate.

At the end you dismantle the tower yourself and lay the parts together complete; on the day you have chosen we come past to take them away. Do that stripping down only once the run has been raked, or you will be balancing on loose branches with frames in your arms. Delivery and collection sit together in a fixed amount per province for a hedge job; you can look that figure up under the cost of delivery and count it in beforehand.

Under the standard EN 1004 this tower falls in load class 3, which is 200 kg of capacity per square metre of deck. On hedge work you will not come near that, because you plus a trimmer weigh very little. Stand two of you up there and add filled trugs of clippings, and it mounts up faster than it looks. What such a class means in practice is explained further under this standard for mobile scaffolds.

In a garden the fixed rules hold just as firmly. Brakes on before a foot goes on the ladder, never roll it with anyone or any tool still up top, and stop when the wind gets up. You feel that wind here more than most: the hedge catches it and you are standing right beside it with a blade at face height. After every move go round all four stabilisers again and set each one firmly on the ground.

What goes wrong most often on hedge work is somebody leaning out over the greenery. Green feels soft and close by, but it carries nothing and your centre of gravity goes over it all the same. Better to shunt along once more. Sweep the clippings off the deck too, since wet leaves make it slippery, and keep children and pets out of the zone directly below you. Every requirement is listed in the rundown of safety rules at height.