Nick Bailey shares his planting tips to protect your garden privacy
Use these planting solutions to protect your privacy on the plot
Gardens are places of sanctuary, seclusion and peace, right? Well they ought to be, but most of us live in built up areas, meaning nearby neighbours often overlook our gardens, making them less private. For this reason, many gardens I’ve designed (even my own) require a number of horticultural buffers, barriers and blocks to keep the garden as private as possible.
Walls and fences can go some way to nullifying neighbour nosiness but planning laws restrict the height of such structures so they’re often insufficient. There are, however, a number of planting solutions that can resolve the issue.
One of the most elegant is pleached beech. Pleached trees are essentially hedges on a stick! In other words, a clipped, rectangular unit of hedge aloft a trunk. They’re available in various heights and are usually still bound to the bamboo cane frame they were trained onto. This can be removed, and the trees (hedges on a stick) planted side by side to form a hedge in the sky.
Standard pleached trees are usually around 3m (10ft) tall with the hedge ‘unit’ at the top some 1.2-1.5m (4-5ft) wide. They’re not cheap, starting at around £150 each, but are perfect for blocking second and third story windows that overlook you.
Furthermore, beech ( Fagus sylvatica) holds its coppery leaves winter-long, so it creates a 365-day a year screen. It’s also possible to train trees this way yourself but it’s a good two to fiveyear investment. Alternatively, you can get the same effect at a fraction of the cost by installing strips of 1.8m x 60cm (6x2ft) trellis on fencing stakes across an overlooked area. The trellis and posts effectively create a series of framing arches, highlighting what lies beyond in your garden while blocking the view. Evergreen climbers work best here, so why not try Hedera colchica, Clematis armandii or Lonicera japonica japonica.
If you’re lucky enough to only be overlooked by one window, then a compact evergreen tree is the solution. Ligustrum japonicum (canopy lifted), Luma apiculata, pi osporum (canopy lifted), cotoneaster ‘Cornubia’, arbutus (canopy lifted) or Eucalyptus pauciflora niphophila will all do the trick here.
However, if your problem is on a lesser scale, why not try skinny evergreen shrubs? The best thing about this solution is it’s relatively inexpensive, easy to do and all my recommended plants have a tiny footprint, so blocking out neighbours doesn’t have to compromise the space in your garden.
Ideal candidates include Nandina domestica, Daphne bholua, pi osporum and Drimys winteri.
So, there you have it – some simple solutions to stop your local Hyacinth Bucket sneaking a peak at your plot!