How to hide from the neighbours (without them even noticing)
Everyone has things they want to hide and, for many of us, it's our neighbours. As cities become denser, everything gets closer. Houses, high-rises, parked cars and busy streets are almost always in view. Obscuring them can become an obsession.
While built structures are one way of masking what you don't want to see, another is to use plants to create naturalistic-feeling green screens. Mixes of trees, shrubs and climbers can be strategically placed to filter or block views, absorb sound, provide shelter from wind and generally create a sense of privacy. These plantings also provide habitat for wildlife.
As landscape architect Sarah Hicks puts it, screen planting is a 'useful buffer on so many levels'. Hicks is a director at Emergent Studios, the outfit that designed the garden that this month took out the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects' top Victorian garden award. This 'Hedge House' garden contains screen planting at every turn.
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Naturalistic screen planting has also been incorporated in the grounds of 'Nine', a new residential development in Sydney shortlisted for the NSW Australian Institute of Landscape Architects awards. Landscape architect Philip Coxall, chairman and director of design at McGregor Coxall, says the landscaping at Sydney's former Channel 9 studios at Willoughby incorporates a variety of trees and shrubs to block views between different apartment buildings, to create privacy in courtyards and to shield residents from the street.
Happily for home gardeners, many of the loose, relaxed-feeling screens that Hicks and Coxall have fashioned can be readily adapted to other situations. More failsafe than formal, single-species hedges, every plant doesn't have to thrive to ensure an overall rhythm is maintained. 'You never know whether each plant is going to succeed, and if there is not a regular pattern you don't miss a plant that dies,' Coxall says.
But the first screen you see at 'Hedge House' does actually have a regular pattern. It is a historic, perfectly sheared cypress hedge that is dense and sculptural and that, from inside the garden, creates a clear sense of removal from the street. 'I see it as spatially valuable and I imagine it is also providing habitat value,' Hicks says. 'It is now the oldest part of the property and there was no question of removing it, we were all on the same page.'
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