How to Create Privacy with Plants
Privacy is one of the greatest benefits of adding height to your garden, especially in the backyard. By adding trees and shrubs to a design, you can transform your yard from an outdoor fishbowl to a secluded haven of peace and comfort. You don’t need to build a bigger fence—just grow your garden upwards!
- Hedges: they have been sheltering properties for hundreds of years. They’re like living fences that provide a thick barrier and sometimes provide a habitat for birds, too. Lilacs, forsythia, privets, juniper, arborvitae, cypress, and rose of Sharon are some of the many hedge-worthy species that will elevate your space.
- Leafy Trees: they rise above your fence line, giving you a beautiful canopy of coverage throughout the summer when you’ll be spending the most time in your backyard. Maples, oaks, redbuds, magnolia, ornamental cherry, crabapple, and dogwood are a few of many great options.
- Evergreens: they give four seasons of privacy and even buffer against noise. Either as a stand-alone tree or planted together, evergreens provide dense coverage and are home to a lot of wildlife. Norway spruce, arborvitae, cypress, balsam fir, and different kinds of white pine, among others, are all suitable for Northwest Arkansas.
Bringing Vertical Structure to Garden
Flower, texture, and color combinations are essential in any outdoor design, and so is the vertical structure. After all, a garden is not merely something you look at, but a place where you can immerse yourself in a world of beauty. Here are ideas to consider when sculpting the design of trees, shrubs, and vertical gardens:
- Seasonal Color: many shrubs and trees offer exquisite flowers at different times of the year, and bring another burst of color in the fall. Between your flowers and trees, you can stagger bloom and color-changing periods so that you have something gorgeous to look at all year long.
- Open Vistas: where do you want to direct your vision? Perhaps you want shelter from the neighbors on one side but an open view of the park from another angle. Take a page from landscape architecture and think about the vistas you can create in your outdoor design.
- Four-Season Appeal: after the leaves and flowers blow away, it’s still nice to have structure and color in your yard. Evergreens do that year-round, and even deciduous plants provide interesting shapes, bark, and silhouettes in the winter.
Creating Shelter from Weather with Plants
Trees and shrubs not only create privacy, beauty, and structure but also create a microclimate in your yard. They’ll provide some shelter for the local wildlife too!
- Shade and Sunlight: in the summer, a leafy tree cools your house with shade and opens it to more sunlight in the winter when the leaves are down.
- Wind: hedges have long been used as a buffer against the wind, providing shelter and warmth for garden plants and people.
- Evergreens: evergreens warm your home in the winter by providing shelter from cold winds and cooling your house in summer with shade and transpiration. Why bother with A/C when you can use mother nature’s natural cooling system?
Any outdoor garden can benefit from a vertical design, but without shrubs or trees, a garden is like a meadow of flowers: beautiful but lacking dimension. Once you add taller companions, you can relax in your private forest, enjoying shade, shelter, warmth, and beauty through all of the seasons! For more information on plants that you can use to add vertical dimension to your space, visit us at Westwood Gardens! [/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
