- Considerations before planting a shrub hedge
- Ensure a blooming garden season with a skilful selection of plants
- No false caution when pruning the privacy hedge from shrubs
Not every garden lover wants to hide behind high stone walls to enjoy some privacy in their own garden. With a privacy hedge made of flowering shrubs, you can not only shield prying eyes to a large extent, but also create hiding and nesting opportunities for birds and useful insects.
Elderberry provides a fragrant and edible privacy screen
Considerations before planting a shrub hedge
Before planting a shrub hedge, you should be aware that this type of privacy screen usually does not provide 100% privacy, especially between autumn and spring. Most of the shrubs native to us inspire between spring and autumn with colorful foliage and a real abundance of flowers, but in winter the bare branches can only shield prying eyes from outside the property line to a limited extent. It is roughly comparable to the curtains on the window: a dense hedge of shrubs offers a pleasant feeling of seclusion and security in the garden even in winter, but the plants are not opaque at this time of year. You should also pay attention to the space requirements of most shrubs: forsythia and weigela cannot be trained to form a hedge with the narrow dimensions of a cypress or beech hedge. It is therefore essential to plan a sufficient distance between the plants and the property line so that you can later cut back the outside of the hedge without any problems.
Ensure a blooming garden season with a skilful selection of plants
As a rule, shrub hedges are not planted as a single variety, but as a colorful mixture of different plant species. The following shrub-like plants (among others) are particularly suitable for this purpose:
- dogwood
- weigela
- forsythia
- lilac
- jasmine
- elder
- ranunculus
Before planting, look at the flowering times of the individual plants and coordinate the arrangement of the plants in the hedge accordingly. In this way you can ensure that in later years different parts of the hedge are always in full bloom at different times of the year in varied colors and their sometimes beguiling fragrance spreads throughout the garden.
No false caution when pruning the privacy hedge from shrubs
An advantage of flowering shrubs as a privacy screen is the relatively fast and vigorous growth of most shrubs used for this purpose. If young plants with several shoots and a size of 50 to 100 cm are used, they can grow into a natural privacy screen of sufficient height within two or three years. Don't be afraid to prune the shrubs in the first year. If these are already well established, the plants make up for a stimulating pruning in the spring with new shoots and stronger branching.
tips
Hedges made from fast-growing shrubs look particularly natural and shapely if the individual plants are not planted in a straight line, but are planted slightly offset to the left and right along a stretched cord.