When creating and redesigning a garden, you should inform yourself in advance about trends and pitfalls. For example, fast-growing shrubs can serve well as privacy hedges, but their growth can reach unpleasant proportions as they get older.
Which fast-growing shrubs are suitable for privacy protection?
Fast-growing shrubs for privacy protection include forsythia, jasmine, buddleia, dogwood, weigela, hawthorn and bloodcurrant. They offer an attractive color sequence and different flowering times in a hedge.
Quickly create a cozy garden atmosphere with fast-growing shrubs
Many design ideas in the garden require years of patience in order to be able to estimate the success or failure of certain planting activities and measures. For many garden owners, changes in the garden can't happen quickly enough. When planting hedges as a natural privacy screen in the garden, the height of growth that can be achieved within a few years depends to a large extent on the selection of the respective plants. On the one hand, it should be young plants that are as large as possible but still easy to transplant and of good plant quality. On the other hand, there are also plant varieties such as boxwood, which do not form a high hedge even after many years. So if you really want to quickly create a dense privacy screen with sufficient height, you should also choose fast-growing shrubs as plant material for the planned hedge.
Suitable plants for a shrub privacy screen
The Thuja occidentalis 'Brabant' and the evergreen cherry laurel, for example, are quite fast-growing, but are generally not classified as shrubs. However, there are a large number of shrubs that are generally not too picky when it comes to location and care and yet, when provided with sufficient light and water, sometimes show phenomenal growth per year:
- Forsythia
- Jasmine
- buddleia
- Dogwood
- Weigela
- Hawthorn
- Bloodcurrant
You can also cleverly combine the above-mentioned flowering shrubs to form a privacy hedge, resulting in an attractive color sequence and an interesting chronological sequence of the different flowering times.
Be sure to plan sufficient spacing areas
In contrast to the columnar-growing Thuja occidentalis 'Smaragd', many flowering shrubs have a rather sprawling growth habit. This can quickly become a problem if the hedge of vigorous young plants is planted too close to the fence or property line. Not only are problems with the neighbors possible, but it also makes the necessary maintenance pruning of the hedge on the outside unnecessarily difficult. You should therefore expect a hedge width of up to 1.5 m or more for shrubs such as forsythia and weigela, even with regular topiary trimming.
Alternatives to fast-growing shrubs as privacy screens
If a natural privacy screen is intended to provide the desired privacy in the garden as quickly as possible, then not only fast-growing shrubs are suitable for such a hedge. For a very narrow yet efficient privacy screen, privacy screen ideas made from climbing plants or certain types of bamboo can also be implemented.
Tip
You should cut back the height of fast-growing shrubs even if they have not yet reached the final height you want for a high level of privacy. In this way you promote the branching of the plants at an early stage and thus also their leaf mass and vigor.
