Portuguese laurel is one of the best hedging plants available to Irish gardeners and it is also one of the most obliging when it comes to propagation. Yes, it will grow from cuttings, and with reasonable success if you take them at the right time of year and treat them correctly. That timing matters more than most people realise, and getting it wrong is the most common reason cuttings fail before they ever get started.

The window to take cuttings from Portuguese laurel opens in June and runs through to early August. What you are looking for at that point is semi-ripe growth, which means stems that have put on new growth this season but have had enough time to firm up slightly. Growth that is too soft and sappy, taken too early in the season, will wilt and collapse before it has any chance to root. Growth that is fully hardened and woody, taken too late in the year, roots far more slowly and with less reliability. The ideal cutting in June or July has a little resistance when you bend it but has not yet become stiff. That is the material you want.

Take cuttings of around three to four inches in length, cutting cleanly just below a leaf node with a sharp, clean blade. Remove the lower leaves, leaving two or three at the tip. If the remaining leaves are large, you can reduce them by half to cut down on moisture loss while the cutting is trying to establish roots. Dip the base in a rooting powder or gel, which is worth doing with Portuguese laurel as it speeds things up, and push the cuttings into a free-draining mix of roughly equal parts perlite and cutting compost. They do not want to sit in anything heavy or moisture-retentive at this stage. A cold frame, a polytunnel, or even a sheltered spot outdoors covered with a clear cloche will all work. What they need is humidity around the leaves and warmth at the roots without the compost ever becoming waterlogged. Check them regularly, water sparingly, and be patient. Rooting can take six to ten weeks.

Once rooted, pot the cuttings individually into small pots and grow them on somewhere sheltered through their first winter. They are reasonably hardy but a young rooted cutting in a small pot is more vulnerable than an established plant in the ground, and losing them at that stage after months of patient propagation is frustrating and avoidable. By the following spring they can go into larger pots or into a nursery row in the open ground to grow on. This is where the patience comes in. To get a cutting to a size where it can realistically anchor a new hedge, you are looking at three to four years of growing on. That is not a reason to dismiss the approach. It is simply the honest timeline.

The reason I raise that timeline is because of the question I am asked almost as often as how to take the cuttings, which is whether you can push new plants in among an existing hedge to thicken it up or replace it gradually. In almost every case, the answer is no, and the reason is straightforward. An established hedge, even a weak or struggling one, has a root system that will outcompete anything you try to establish in its shadow. The existing plants are already occupying the soil, already drawing water and nutrients from it, and already blocking out the light. A small cutting or even a pot-grown plant placed in among them is being asked to compete against opponents it has no chance of beating. It will be starved of water, starved of nutrients and starved of light before it has any chance to get going. I have seen this tried many times and it very rarely works.

The approach that does work, if you are looking to replace a failing hedge with Portuguese laurel, is to take your cuttings now, grow them on separately in pots or in a nursery row where they have everything they need, and in three to four years remove the old hedge entirely and replace it with your homegrown plants. That sounds like a long time, but it is a realistic plan that will actually succeed rather than a shortcut that will leave you with nothing to show for the effort. Portuguese laurel is worth the patience. It is a dense, handsome, wildlife-friendly evergreen that performs well across most Irish conditions, tolerates wind, suits both formal and informal situations, and once established needs very little from you. If your existing escallonia hedge is already in decline, that three to four year growing-on period gives it time to fail gracefully while your replacement is quietly getting ready. Getting the soil prepared properly before planting out is what determines how quickly those young plants establish once the old hedge comes out.