I recently purchased a home with a large Lawson cypress hedge along the neighboring property line. It's about a dozen trees, each 20-30 feet tall and maybe 5-6 foot diameter on average. My neighbor recently complained about the needle buildup under the hedge as a potential fire hazard.
When I went to clean out the needles underneath, I found way more than I expected. The needles under the first tree completely filled the 96-gallon compost container from the pickup service. Checking the next few trees in succession, each seems to have more needles underneath than the last.
By the time I got to the fifth tree, the needles were about 2 feet deep (after the first foot or so they're mostly composted). The needles have completely covered the lower branches, which have grown roots, and emerge from the ground a few feet away. The lower foot or two of the foliage is made up of these branches. Further up the tree, needles have also piled up between the dense branches. Shaking these out produces a significant volume of additional dead needles.
How should I handle this? Is it indeed a fire hazard? The needle piles are difficult to access due to the density of foliage. I thought about pruning off the bottom six inches of branches to ease cleaning out the needles, but the growth habit is upwards such that I'd have to remove the bottom two feet of foliage and I'm not sure it would fill back in. I'm also not sure how I'd prune the rooting branches.
