When to prune privet?
- Botanical name
- Ligustrum vulgare
- Family
- Oleaceae
Privet is pruned from May to September. It is planted from September to February.
Privet is a woody perennial.
Privet grows fast and one cut a year is not enough.
The leaves and berries contain syringin and other glycosides, so gloves go on for the shearing and for clearing up the cut branches.
The spacing is measured out for a row in a hedge. A single bush left unsheared grows as wide as it is tall.
Privet through the year
- pruning
- planting
In short
Growing conditions
Is privet toxic to cats and dogs?
Yes. Toxic to people and animals, toxic parts: leaves and fruit.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- The plant dies suddenly, often in mid season and without any decline beforehand. Peel the bark at ground level and under it there is a white or cream sheet of fungal tissue, thin as the skin of a mushroom. In the soil there are black or brown strands like bootlaces. In late summer and autumn tufts of honey brown mushrooms with a whitish ring on the stalk appear by the stumps or over dead roots.
- Prevention
- The fungus spreads through the soil with its strands, from a few centimetres to a good hand's width below the surface, and infects the roots of a living plant when it touches them. So do not leave stumps and dead roots in the ground. No plant is completely resistant, but privet, lilac, viburnum, weigela, forsythia, butterfly bush, rhododendron, thuja and walnut are particularly susceptible.
- What to do
- There are no products. The only thing that works is digging out and removing every infected root and stump, which takes away the food without which the strands in the soil do not grow. A vertical barrier of rubber or thick plastic sheet, buried about half a metre deep and standing a few centimetres above ground, stops the spread into an unaffected part of the garden.
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Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Oleaceae).
Sources about the plant: ASPCA Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Royal Horticultural Society, University of Illinois Extension, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 27 August 2026.