What can I do with fallen laurel leaves from my garden border?

[Turophiles]

Hi all, novice gardener here. I have a long border of laurel trees (prunus Caucasia) planted as a privacy screen down one side of the garden. They’re evergreen, but do leaf drop, obviously. Is there anything useful I can do with the scads of fallen leaves? I don’t currently have a compost set up (saving for an enclosed composter after a garden rat infestation I don’t want to repeat) and I gather they need shredding and still take ages to break down?

Or did I inadvertently choose a fairly useless tree type?

I’ve a big laurel, same problem. They last forever. Although I compost nearly everything, I take these to the tip, green waste. Their compost bins will get far hotter than mine. Imdon't think they're good for the garden either, too acidic?

They take forever to compost. Just send them in your green waste.

You can’t generally compost laurel leaves at home, they take forever to break down and have some kind of toxin/acid? I’m hazy on the details. We put ours in the garden waste bin that the council collects, I assume their compost heaps are better able to handle laurel as they said that’s fine when I checked with them.

Thanks — that’s what I’ve been doing! I just thought I’d check with the knowledgeable in case there was something I was unaware of.

It just came to my mind this week as the green waste bin is entirely full, so I’m keeping a large skip bag of laurel leaves and thinking how substantial and leathery they are…

I think cyanide!

I just leave mine as mulch in the border below. They help keep the weeds down.

Apparently if you shred them and use them as mulch they're good slug repellent. How useful that is probably depends on how many leaves you have and how much space you've got though.

I have 22 trees (and about 20 feet of hedge that pre-existed us)!

Yes I don’t really want that in my garden tbh!

I think if you take them in the car to the tip then it is dangerous for you. I was told the leaves give off toxins. There was a talk in the Alnwick Poison Garden some time ago.

Agree with others, no good for composting and the entire plant is toxic, including to dogs, cats and humans. No good for wildlife either.

I have no idea why they have become so popular as hedging.

Well, with hindsight, I would make a different decision, but I was a total novice who had just bought a fixer-upper with an eyesore down one entire side of the front garden, in full view of all the house windows, and my primary concern was something evergreen that I could afford, that would establish reasonably fast in poor soil and block it out. (Which in fairness, it has done!)

I do have a long mixed native hedge elsewhere in the garden, as well as lots of native tree varieties and pollinator-friendly plants, so it's not some laurel wasteland.

@Turophiles They grow well, look nice, are easy to obtain and the plants are cheap. So laurel hedges do have those good points I suppose.😁

Loving the sound of the rest of your garden. Is there a corner somewhere you can leave a pile of ordinary leaves for hedgehogs to hibernate?

Most of my garden is currently a pile of ordinary leaves! (Injury in the spring means it's the reverse of neat.) We're also adjacent to a large ruined building on extensive grounds that no one has touched since the 90s, so it's basically a big, city-centre nature reserve -- we have rabbits, foxes, squirrels, lots of frogs, and a lot of general birdlife and several different types of birds of prey around on a regular basis. A buzzard took a pigeon right outside the kitchen window yesterday and nearly gave me a heart attack...

And before I castigate the poor laurel trees too much -- their trunks are maybe six feet high before the foliage starts, so underneath them is a nice place to plant shade-loving plants that are OK with comparative dryness. And a Rambling Rector rose has scrambled off a nearby wall onto them...

@Turophiles Your garden is sounding more and more lovely by the minute!