Planting a hedge in your garden: What to avoid and what to try
If you'd like to plant a hedge around your garden for privacy, and you’re looking for inspiration beyond the traditional yew or beech, what are your options?
Shrubs and small trees can be the perfect option for hedging in the garden, defining boundaries, creating privacy, and screening your outside space. But don't just consider planting it along the fence line; look at incorporating hedges along a patio or seating area to separate the area from the rest of the garden and block any potential sight-lines from neighbouring windows.
Admired for its versatility and easy maintenance, yew is elegantly stylish, offering year-round interest. Meanwhile, beech is loved for its magnificent dense foliage and bright, fluttery leaves – its golden-green colour turns a rich copper in autumn. And with tiny, glossy green leaves, box provides year-round interest. It has a slow growth rate and compact growing habit, so it's best suited to low formal hedges.
But good news: there are lots of other possibilities when it comes to hedging plants. So long as a shrub grows to a suitable height, say two metres or more, you can plant a row of them, and it'll be a hedge.
Hedging plants to try
If you want flowers, you could try dog roses or cherry blossoms – the white-flowered Prunus avium is a good one. Mexican orange blossom Choisya ternata and osmanthus are both evergreen and have the most wonderful scented flowers.
Bamboo can get very tall so it makes a very effective evergreen hedge, or try the weeping bamboo Fargesia murielae (it's non-invasive), as that makes a good healthy screen all the way down to the ground.
Hedging plants to avoid
Plants that aren't reliable should also be avoided, as a hedge needs to grow well and uniformly to provide the upmost privacy all year round. Try not to choose anything that requires special treatment or is susceptible to frost. Varieties such as Californian lilac can be cut back by frost, and camellias require quite acidic soil, so unless you're happy to put the work in, it's best to go for something less demanding.
Plants that are leggy don't form a good screen, so things like buddlejas (although sweetly perfumed, popular with pollinators, and loved for their show-stopping colour) wouldn't be the most suitable if you want year-round privacy.
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