When laying out a new garden or redesigning it, you should definitely find out about trends and pitfalls in advance. For example, fast-growing shrubs can serve well as a privacy hedge, but their growth can also reach unpleasant proportions as they get older.

Although the thuja is not a shrub, it is a very popular privacy screen

Quickly create a cozy garden atmosphere with fast-growing shrubs

Many design ideas in the garden require years of patience in order to even be able to assess the success or failure of certain planting actions and measures. For many garden owners, changes in the garden can't actually happen fast enough. When planting hedges as a natural privacy screen in the garden, the growth height that can be achieved within a few years depends to a large extent on the selection of the respective plants. On the one hand, the young plants should be as large as possible, but still easy to transplant and of good plant quality. On the other hand, there are also plant varieties such as the boxwood, which does not form a high hedge even after many years. So if you really want to quickly provide a dense privacy screen with sufficient height, you should also opt for correspondingly fast-growing shrubs as plant material for the planned hedge.

Suitable plants for a privacy screen from shrubs

Thuja occidentalis 'Brabant' and the evergreen cherry laurel, for example, are certainly fast-growing, but generally not classified as shrubs. However, there are a large number of shrubs that are generally not too choosy in terms of location and care and yet, given sufficient light and water, show a sometimes phenomenal growth rate per year:

  • forsythia
  • jasmine
  • Buddleia
  • dogwood
  • weigela
  • hawthorn
  • bloodcurrant

You can also use a clever combination to arrange the flowering shrubs mentioned as a privacy hedge in such a way that there is an attractive color sequence and an interesting chronological sequence of the different flowering times.

It is essential that you plan for sufficiently generous spacing

In contrast to the columnar Thuja occidentalis 'Smaragd', many flowering shrubs have a rather sprawling growth habit. This can quickly become a problem if the hedge made of vigorous young plants was planted too close to the fence or the property line. Then not only are problems with the neighbors possible, but it also unnecessarily complicates the pruning of the hedge on the outside, which is necessary for maintenance. You should therefore expect a hedge width of up to 1.5 m or more with shrubs such as forsythia and weigela, even with regular topiary.

Alternatives to fast-growing shrubs as privacy screens

If a natural privacy screen is to ensure the desired privacy in the garden as quickly as possible, then such a hedge is not only suitable for fast-growing shrubs. For a very narrow and yet efficient privacy screen, privacy screen ideas made of climbing plants or certain types of bamboo can also be realized.

tips

You should also cut back the height of fast-growing shrubs if they have not yet reached the final height you want for a high privacy screen. In this way you promote the branching of the plants at an early stage and thus also their leaf mass and vigour.

Category:

Garden design