When it comes to garden, terrace and balcony design, many hobby gardeners and fresh air lovers are spoiled for choice these days: Creatively processed materials certainly offer alternatives to natural privacy screens made from plants or natural materials, but the latter are often ahead and can shine with practical and aesthetic advantages.
What options are there for a natural privacy screen in the garden?
A natural privacy screen in the garden offers privacy and is ecologically valuable. Popular plants for privacy hedges include beech, forsythia, weigela, climbing plants and jasmine. Alternatively, fences and mats can be created yourself from reeds, hazelnut branches or other natural materials.
A privacy hedge as an alternative to the wall
Thanks to tricky products such as special stone baskets, it is no longer necessarily a question of obtaining the appropriate official permission whether you can build a wall around your own garden or not. Of course, a wall primarily offers a certain feeling of security and durability through its stability. In addition, natural stone walls with their very special flora and fauna can represent a very decorative and ecologically valuable design element in a garden. However, walls often have a very intimidating or even restrictive effect if they stand at a certain height on level ground and effectively block any view or breath of air. A privacy hedge made of plants such as beeches, thuja subspecies or the evergreen cherry laurel, on the other hand, offers a similar level of privacy, but is still a little more permeable to light, air and various types of small and micro organisms. Many species of birds and insects require dense hedges as breeding grounds and habitat, which is why they fulfill a very important function in the garden.
The maintenance effort for a natural privacy screen in the garden
The amount of care required for a natural privacy screen in the garden naturally depends not only on its dimensions in terms of length, but also on the height and width of the trees and bushes planted in a row. The following plants, which are particularly popular when planting privacy hedges, have such high growth rates that pruning may be necessary up to two or three times a year:
- Beech
- Forsythia
- Weigela
- Climbing plants such as knotweed and Virginia creeper
- Jasmine
Conversely, this high growth rate also means a relatively high nutrient requirement in the form of fertilizer and compost as well as good cutting tolerance, since mistakes made during cutting usually grow out again very quickly.
Make your own natural privacy screen from natural materials
Not every natural privacy screen has to be a living privacy screen. With a little patience and dexterity, privacy fences and mats can be made yourself from natural materials such as reeds, hazelnut branches and other materials. In particular, the fence-like privacy screen variants made from branches and other pieces of wood can then be used as a trellis for a flowering privacy screen.
Naturally integrate privacy hedges into the garden design
Privacy hedges in a well-thought-out garden are not only a means to an end at the property border, but can even represent quite significant accents in the visual composition of different plant species as a flowering shrub wall or as a green grid of climbing plants such as wisteria and trumpet flower. Ideally, you should pay attention to a predominantly tiered structure of the individual garden areas, in which lower perennials in front of the higher privacy hedge ideally also provide a color contrast.
Tip
A natural privacy screen must also be attached and adequately secured in an exposed location with regular, strong gusts of wind, just like an artificial privacy screen.
