Common privet

Family

Oleaceae

Habit

Shrub

Height

3 m

Spread

3 m

Growth

medium

Lifespan

30 years

First yield

after 5 years

Hardiness

zone 4–7

Shade tolerance

partial shade

Soil

Sand, Silt, Loam, Clay

Soil moisture

very dry – very wet

pH

5.5 – 7

Synonyms

Liguster

Times apply to the northern hemisphere in a temperate climate and shift with altitude and cultivar.

Other uses: Yellow dye is extracted from the leaves, while a different dye is obtained from the bark. The berries yield a bluish-green dye that is more stable than most green shades. Additionally, a black dye and ink can be obtained from the fruit. The wood is hard and fine-grained, valuable for turning and making small tools. It also serves as a source of charcoal. The young branches are used in basket weaving and hurdle making.

A highly tolerant and easy-to-grow plant that thrives in any soil that is not very poor. It grows well in heavy clay soils and prefers calcareous soils but also thrives in thin, dry soils. The plant grows well in open forests or in the full shade of a wall, but it blooms and fruits best in a sunny location. It is tolerant to air pollution and once established, it can also withstand drought but is not waterlogged. A spreading shrub that forms dense thickets and provides good bird protection. An important food plant for many caterpillars, including the larvae of the privet hawk moth. This species is particularly susceptible to the honey fungus.

Privet is among the easiest of all shrubs to propagate, which is why long hedges are usually raised at home rather than bought in. Hardwood cuttings are the simplest route: in late autumn or winter, pencil-thick sections about twenty centimetres long are cut from one-year-old shoots and pushed into loose soil that will not dry out, leaving two buds above ground; they root outdoors without film or rooting hormone. Semi-ripe softwood cuttings taken in summer also root reliably if kept shaded and moist. Seed is possible but awkward: it needs several months of cold, germinates irregularly over two years and is slow to produce plantable stock. In the wild birds do the distributing, which is why privet seeds itself out of hedges and appears unbidden along woodland edges.

Despite its reputation as an ordinary hedging plant, privet has real ecological value — provided it is allowed to flower and fruit, which the usual twice-yearly shearing prevents. The strongly scented panicles of June and July are worked by honeybees and by mining and furrow bees; nectar and pollen are rated only moderate, yet the species counts among the important food sources for hoverflies, with some fourteen species recorded. It is a larval food plant for 29 moth and butterfly species, two of them exclusive, the best known being the privet hawk-moth, alongside the lilac beauty and the swallow-tailed moth. The black berries hang into late winter and are then taken by about 21 bird species, including blackbird, song thrush and bullfinch. The dense, thornless branchwork provides cover and nest sites.

Special features: very tolerant (soil, drought, salt, air pollution, lime, shade, sea wind, ...), resilient and undemanding hedge plant; Forms a dense root system and thicket for protection, as well as food for small mammals, ~20 bird species, many bee and caterpillar species; The Ligustrum variety 'Atrovirens' is considered evergreen.

Europe, north-west Africa and the Near East: wild privet is the only species of its genus native to Europe. Its range runs from Morocco through southern, western and central Europe to Britain and southern Scandinavia, and eastwards into the Caucasus. In Germany it is widespread in the south and in limestone country; northwards it becomes scarcer and stays more closely tied to warm situations. It reaches about 1500 metres in altitude. Far beyond this natural range it has been planted as a hedging shrub and, spread by birds, has naturalised widely, including in North America, Australia and New Zealand, where it is locally classed as a problem plant.

Privet is a shrub of woodland edges, scrub and hedgerows on calcareous ground. Its typical sites are the sunny to half-shaded margins of mixed deciduous woodland, scrub mantles at forest edges, field hedges, scrubbing-over dry slopes and the fringes of floodplain woodland; it grows by preference on calcareous clay and loam. In phytosociological terms it belongs to the blackthorn-privet scrub of warmer districts. It takes half shade well but not deep shade, and survives drought thanks to deep roots. Its leaf duration is notable: in mild winters it keeps part of its foliage, in hard ones it sheds it. It is semi-evergreen rather than evergreen — unlike the Asian privets of garden hedges.