Woven Hazel Fence Panels: A Buyer’s Companion

People ring up asking for woven hazel fence panels and then apologise for not knowing the proper word. There is nothing to apologise for. “Woven hazel fence panel” describes the thing better than the trade word does, and the trade word — hurdle — is a leftover from when these were made to pen sheep and carried about the field on a shepherd’s back. If you have been searching for woven panels, wicker fencing or wattle screens and getting nowhere useful, you have been looking for hurdles the whole time.

So this is the guide written in the words buyers actually use, with the trade words handed over as we go. What the material looks like, what it costs, how high to go, how it is fixed, how long it lasts — and one distinction that catches people out badly enough that it comes second, before anything else.

Is a woven hazel fence panel the same as a hazel hurdle?

Yes — the same product, two names for it. A hazel hurdle is a woven hazel fence panel. You will also see it called a hazel wattle panel, a handwoven hazel screen, or simply wicker fencing by people who have only ever seen one in a garden centre. All the same thing: hazel rods woven by hand around a row of stouter uprights.

The word you want when you are comparing prices is hurdle, because that is what the makers, the growers and we call them. Our full range sits under hazel hurdles, and every panel on that page is what you were searching for.

What is the difference between woven hazel and the “woven fence panels” at a builders’ merchant?

One is hand-woven hazel rods; the other is machine-woven pine slats, and they are not comparable products. This trips up more buyers than any other point on the page, so it is worth being blunt.

Walk into a merchant, ask for a woven fence panel, and you will very likely be shown a 6ft × 6ft frame filled with thin strips of softwood — usually pine — threaded in and out of vertical battens by machine. Those panels are cheap, uniform, orange-brown when new and grey and papery within three seasons. The slats are a few millimetres thick, they curl at the ends as they dry, and once one snaps there is no mending it. It is a perfectly honest product at its price; it simply has nothing to do with hazel beyond the word “woven”.

A hazel hurdle is a round rod of grown wood, split lengthways and bent while it is still green, woven under tension so the panel holds itself together with no frame, no nails and no glue. It is made by a person, one rod at a time. Held side by side the difference is obvious in a second: the hazel is thicker, softer in colour, irregular, and it smells of wood rather than sawmill.

If a price looks too good for hand-woven hazel, it is pine. Check the description for the word *hazel* and a thickness you can see.

What does woven hazel actually look like?

Silver-grey — a soft silvery grey-brown with olive and honey moving through it depending on the light. Not orange, not golden, and definitely not red. If you are picturing a warm russet weave, you are picturing willow, which is the deep red-brown one: slimmer rods, a close even weave, a panel that reads as a colour in its own right.

Hazel does the opposite. The rods are thicker, the weave is looser and more rustic, and the uprights are deliberately left standing proud above and below the woven section — the mark of a properly made hurdle rather than a trimmed-off screen. Put one behind a border and within a season you stop registering it as a fence at all. That is the point of it.

Because every panel is woven by hand from coppiced rods, no two are the same width of weave or exactly the same shade. All of ours are a standard 1.83m (6ft) wide, and the timber is FSC-certified.

When is hazel cut for hurdles?

Between November and March, while the sap is down. Hazel is coppiced — cut back hard to the stool on a rotation of roughly seven to ten years, after which it throws up a fresh crop of straight rods from the same root, and the same stool goes on producing for generations. Nothing is planted and nothing is felled.

Winter rods rive cleanly. The maker splits each one down its length with a billhook, then weaves it green and pliable around the upright sails while it will still take a bend. As the panel dries it shrinks onto itself and tightens, which is why a hurdle needs no fixings of its own: the wood does the work. Cut in summer, the same rod tears instead of splitting and the panel never sets up hard.

What is the best height for hazel hurdles?

Five foot, for most people who want privacy — and the reason is that screening gets judged sitting down, not standing up. Sit in the chair you actually use, have someone walk the fence line holding a cane, and mark the point where the neighbour’s window disappears. It usually lands nearer 5ft than 6ft, and 5ft casts far less shadow.

Below 3ft you are edging and defining, not hiding — lovely along the front of a border, useless against an overlooking window. Four foot is the workhorse for bin stores and oil tanks, because standing next to it you can still see over and reach across. Six foot is a proper boundary and worth it where a path or a road runs close, as long as you have thought about the shadow it will throw across the border at its foot. Every height is in stock.

How much is hazel fencing?

From £27.49 a panel, and £269.60 in panels for a 30ft run at full height. That run is five 6ft × 6ft hurdles at £53.92, plus six posts and a pack of ties on top. At 5ft the same 30ft is five 5ft panels at £45.90 — £229.50 — which is the version most people end up buying once they have done the sitting-down test.

That is dearer than the cheapest lap panel on a forecourt and cheaper than most decorative screening, and it buys you something neither of those offers: a fence with no bad side. There is no smooth face and no ugly face to argue about with a neighbour, because a woven panel looks the same from both.

Will a woven panel survive a gale?

Better than a solid one, for the same reason a hedge does — an open weave filters wind instead of blocking it. A solid 6ft fence is a sail. It takes the whole force of a gust and something has to give, which is usually the post at ground level. Worse, the air that clears the top comes down again in a hard swirl a few feet beyond, and that is exactly where people have planted the things they wanted sheltered.

A hazel hurdle lets a good part of the gust through the weave and breaks up what it does catch. Less load on the posts, and calm rather than turbulence in the lee of it. Growers used woven hurdles as windbreaks around orchards and market gardens for centuries before anyone measured why they worked.

How do you fix woven hazel panels to posts?

With stainless steel cable ties — four to every upright, eight on a 6ft × 6ft panel. Thread each tie through the weave, round the post, and draw it tight. A pack of fifty stainless steel cable ties covers six full-height panels.

Not galvanised wire: it work-hardens where you twist it and snaps, usually in the first hard winter. Not screws: they split the uprights and pin the panel solid, leaving it nowhere to move when the wind gets under it. A stainless tie holds firm and still allows the fraction of movement a woven panel needs to stay in one piece.

Hurdles fix to the face of a round post rather than dropping into a slot, so a run can follow a curve or a slope with no cutting whatsoever. Use pointed machine round fence posts pressure treated to UC4 for ground contact: 1.8m × 100mm for panels up to 4ft, 2.4m × 100mm for 5ft and 6ft. Count one post per 6ft panel plus one to finish the run — four panels need five posts — and get about 60cm of each into the ground. Drive them into firm soil; on sand, wet clay or an exposed coastal site, concrete them and let them cure before you hang anything. The whole sequence is photographed in our guide to installing hazel and willow hurdles.

How long will a hazel fence last?

Five to ten years in an ordinary British garden, and where yours lands in that range is almost entirely down to water. Hazel goes up green with nothing painted on it. It survives by drying out between downpours, so anything that stops it drying costs you years.

Three things matter more than any treatment. Keep an inch of daylight under the bottom uprights so the panel is never standing in soil. Leave both faces open to moving air — never back a hurdle flat onto a solid fence, and pull the ivy off it. And re-tighten the ties each spring, because hazel shrinks as it seasons and a slack weave shakes itself apart.

Most people never treat theirs at all and let it weather to a paler grey, which suits an older garden. If you would rather slow that down, a clear breathable oil in late summer is plenty; never varnish, which seals damp into the rods. There is more detail in our guide to treating hazel hurdles.

Delivery

Start with the silver-grey hazel hurdles if you want the boundary to go quiet, or the willow hurdles if you want the red-brown. Same six heights, same fixings, same delivery.

Common questions

Also worth reading: woven fence panels for how the different names line up and how woven compares with sawn-timber panels, and garden screening for choosing a height that actually solves the job.