This Forum will close on Wednesday 27 March, 2024. Please refer to the announcement on the Discussions page for further detail.
Privacy for south facing garden
mattandclaire201428608
Posts: 6
Hi all - I'm really hoping you might be able to help me out.
I have a good size south facing garden (about 9.5m wide and 28m long) but there are a few issues that we need to resolve asap, our neighbors on the east boundary have a large raised patio at the rear of their house (from the house past that yellow bush on the left) which means they an see our entire garden whenever they are sitting outside, they hgave also removed all the planting from their garden so that everything on the left of that fence has gone and is now just houses - we need some privacy and a view back!
We would like to plant some trees, maybe pleached hornbeam on that east boundary to get some privacy and would like some shade but are concerned about
a) how to stop the run of trees if we go for pleached as we wouldn't want them to run all the way down the garden
b) loss of morning light to our kitchen which sits to the right as you look over the garden
We have oriented the house towards the garden (image below so you can see sightlines) with a recent building project but now need to get the garden full and green again.
We are happy to lose chunks of lawn as we want to get more planting into the garden longer term but no idea where to start to solve the immediate problem - post building work (hence the awful pic - garden does look a little tidier than this now).
I have a good size south facing garden (about 9.5m wide and 28m long) but there are a few issues that we need to resolve asap, our neighbors on the east boundary have a large raised patio at the rear of their house (from the house past that yellow bush on the left) which means they an see our entire garden whenever they are sitting outside, they hgave also removed all the planting from their garden so that everything on the left of that fence has gone and is now just houses - we need some privacy and a view back!
We would like to plant some trees, maybe pleached hornbeam on that east boundary to get some privacy and would like some shade but are concerned about
a) how to stop the run of trees if we go for pleached as we wouldn't want them to run all the way down the garden
b) loss of morning light to our kitchen which sits to the right as you look over the garden
We have oriented the house towards the garden (image below so you can see sightlines) with a recent building project but now need to get the garden full and green again.
We are happy to lose chunks of lawn as we want to get more planting into the garden longer term but no idea where to start to solve the immediate problem - post building work (hence the awful pic - garden does look a little tidier than this now).
1
Posts
Beautiful extension, BTW. Lovely space. 👍
You do, indeed, have a good sized garden there. Re trees near the boundary, bear in mind the roots will go under and the canopy over the fence towards your neighbour. What sort of final height are you looking to achieve with your living screen?
I think we want about a meter above the fence to screen the houses at the rear of us.
Im worried the pleached trees will look too much like a wall and impact the light.
Keen to get some shade in the garden but wondering if more individual trees in more strategic positions might be a better route?
Any thoughts or advice would be very welcome!
Pleached hornbeams would need more maintenance to keep them to the shape and size.
I can't find any really good pics as an example, but maybe you can see on the right hand side what I mean. Two trees and then the row of 8 laurels is not in the pics but runs along the earlier section of the boundary fence (where my neighbour likes to stand and smoke while looking over my fence
has anyone used multistem birch before? i quite like that there are other birch trees in sightlines and might give some consistency with other gardens we can see from ours now
@mattandclaire201428608 I think from memory I was told that after a certain height/maturity of tree that they don't recommend bare root... but it depends how large you're wanting to buy them as I suppose. When I bought my two mature trees, they offered a free planting service as part of the purchase. In case it's of any use, this is where I bought my two trees from, they were very helpful and they seem to cover all of South and East England.
https://www.kingco.co.uk/
I have three young Himalayan silver birch at the back right, not multi stem though!