Yes, it can be used for a hedge and responds well to shearing.

Not my choice though for that plant, but it works. Pieris japonicum 'Mountain Fire' is another choice that will work. I put about 30 of them in for a customer that requested them. They weren't sheared though, and had a lot of room to go up and out.

Mike

Without any indication of your location, it's impossible to give a realistic answer. I'm sure miketann is correct that they can be used as hedges in the PNW, but if you are in a colder area, maybe not so much. In Z6 and colder pieris are subject to winter burn, slower growth and other problems in common with their rhododendron relatives. If roads in your area are regularly salted to melt snow, a driveway location would also have to deal with that issue.

It also prefers acid soil so if yours is alkaline it will languish.

"We have about a 4 foot strip between our driveway and the neighbours'."

Four feet is not a lot of room for a 7-12' shrub, especially when set in between two driveways where opening vehicle doors and walking while carrying stuff is expected.

Even if you could prune these pieris to size you would have to do it very often and it would spoil the look of them and in all probability you'd lose the flowers as well. It's a recipe for a high maintenance disaster.

Do yourself and your neighbor a favor and choose something more suited to the available space.

Between your driveway and the neighbor's what? Neighbor's driveway, or neighbor's property? If these shrubs extend into your neighbor's property will they chop them back? Are you looking for a screen of some kind?

Generally Pieris doesn't grow all the quickly (don't know about your region though). If this is a somewhat shady spot it may do OK, but without a pic and better description of the property and some indication of where you live, it's really hard to give an answer.

Thanks for your answers. It would be between my driveway and my neighbours' driveway. We live in zone 8A and these seem to grow really well here. The deer don't eat them like they do with cedar hedges. I've already pruned them this year so I was a little horrified to see how much they've grown in that short amount of time. I just hate to get rid of them. They are beautiful, but will definitely get too big too fast for our back flower garden.

'Forest Flame' is a hybrid that is more coarse and open growing than Pieris japonica. Although it requires decades to grow 12 ft. tall I would not plant it where it was going to be crowded at all. I used to have a decades old P. japonica planted near my drive and I got tired of having to prune it back where it kept wanting to grow out over the pavement, had the entire shrub taken out a few years ago, when other work was being done here.

These have the same kind of structure as rhododendrons and like them do not lend themselves to being sheared as one might do with a formal box or yew hedge or topiary. For an attractive outcome each pruning cut needs to be selected individually and made with a pruning shear. And this needs to be done right after bloom, once per year.