The desire to make your own plot cozy, in which each element of landscape design harmoniously complements the other, naturally for every gardener. The hedge is not only a wonderful backdrop for flower beds and garden decoration, but also an excellent protection of the site from prying eyes. The formation of such a natural defense is a whole art that requires patience and painstaking work, as well as an incredibly exciting process. Properly choosing and placing shrubs for hedges on the site, you can transform the entire territory by unobtrusively dividing it into zones.
Factors determining the choice of plants for hedges
The choice of plants for hedges depends primarily on the desired appearance of the natural fence. If we take the species ratio used for decorating crops as the basis, the hedges can consist of coniferous and deciduous plantings, and if we take their form, then the fences can be freely growing or shorn.
Depending on the height of the thickets, plant fences can take the form of low borders, medium or high fences.
Border landings with a height of 30-70 cm allow you to accent and highlight landscape elements. Quite often, borders are used for zoning the territory
1-1.5 meter plant compositions are used to divide the site into parts and mark its boundaries. High trellises can protect the site from dust, wind and noise, as well as protect from the prying eyes of passers-by
Hedgerows can be planted as a single-row or double-row method. Single row plantings are used to decorate the site, they do not protect the territory from dust and noise. Two-row compositions are arranged in places where more substantial protection is required.
The selection of plants also depends on the varieties of existing plantings in the garden. Combining several types of plants into a single living composition, one should take into account the coincidence of the external design and life cycle of each of the elements: the shape and color of foliage, flowering periods.
Deciduous hedge
Deciduous plants are most often used for arranging living fences, as they are able to transmit more diffused light and more easily tolerate adverse climatic conditions. These plants easily tolerate seasonal pruning and are ideal for creating molded borders.
By arranging borders and creating fences up to 1 m high, you can use undersized shrubs: boxwood, Japanese euonymus, alpine currant
When planning to create free-growing hedges, you can stop your choice on heather, spirea, henomeles, magnolia padius, cinquefoil
For living fences 2-3 meters high among deciduous species, they have proved themselves well: common privet, hawthorn, buckthorn evergreen. Among the flowering plants, preference can be given to: forsythia, jasmine, dwarf species of lilac, Syrian rose, hydrangea tree. Wanting to create a composition of berry plants, you can stop the choice on viburnum, Japanese quince, cornel, edible honeysuckle.
When arranging thorny hedges, you can use: rosehip roses, climbing roses, Daurian rosehips, purple hawthorn, Amur barberry.
Climbing plants for hedges allow you to give an elegant original appearance to the building envelope.
Since climbing plants have a weak trunk, for the arrangement of such an openwork fence, it is necessary to make a frame
When making the site, you can use honeysuckle, girl’s grapes, grape clematis, petioles hydrangea, prickly chingil, ordinary hops.
Effectively look plant compositions created from planted in rows of flowering trees with a bright color of the bark. The most interesting colors are felt cherry, chubushnik, currant, barberry
High living walls up to 5 meters or more can be equipped using fast-growing plants to decorate your hedge: Holly Holly, black and white mulberry, hazel, hornbeam. For tall plant compositions, decorative forms of plums and apple trees, as well as beech, maple and linden, are also suitable.
Designing the base of the hedge with flowering shrubs and a mixborder of stunted plants will make the composition more expressive
Coniferous living fence
Evergreen shrubs give the garden a austere and restrained appearance. In comparison with deciduous representatives of the plant world, conifers are more demanding in care.
Among the small candidates for arranging the border, you can distinguish juniper, pieris with shiny lanceolate foliage, Canadian spruce
For medium and high living fences, cypress peas, tall thuja, ordinary spruce, yew Canadian. Most conifers can easily withstand pruning. This feature allows you to form a strict, even coniferous fence.
A sheared or free-growing hedge?
Free-growing plants are obviously the least demanding. To create coniferous free-growing fences, plants with different texture of needles and the shape of the crown are selected. Combined landings look interesting. A combination of deciduous trees of mountain ash and birch with coniferous beauties of spruce and pine is very successful.
Free-growing compositions that look like natural plantings. They occupy a lot of space on the site
Sheared herbal compositions have a more aesthetic appearance
The compact form of the hedge visually takes up less space. But in order to contain this form, it is required to make certain efforts annually to trim and care. Among the decorative forms of plants, the pruning of red and white degrains, Japanese meadowsweet, small elm leaves, cotoneaster multiflorous, Japanese quince, yellow acacia are easily tolerated.
Choosing the best plants for hedges, you can create a composition that not only disguises unsightly areas, but “revives” the unattractive enclosing structures. In addition, it will act as a “filter”, giving additional purification to the air.
