If you are lucky enough to have a garden you no doubt want it to be a mostly private space. Ideally, a garden should be somewhere you can go to truly relax and unwind. Something that is hard to do if you are overlooked by neighbors or passersby can see into your yard. Often the answer, in that situation, is to create a fence or hedge that acts as a barrier to prying eyes. To help you to do that I have pulled together a few approaches that should work for most people. Importantly, they are all environmentally friendly ideas that will enhance your property this summer as well as protect nature.
Plant some shrubs
If you wanted to you could plant some sort of evergreen trees. They look good and grow fast, but most varieties do not provide homes that birds and other wildlife like to live in. So, from an environmental point of view, they are not the best option. A far better approach is to buy some shrubs and hedges from The Tree Center instead. There are many types available, many of which are very wildlife friendly. The flowering varieties will attract all kinds of insects and can provide food for important insects like bees, wasps, and butterflies.
Create a willow fence
Living willow fences can look really nice. You can either go down the traditional route and create a full-blown hedgerow or weave a fence out of young supple willow. In the long term, the hedgerow will benefit the environment the most. However, it will need to be quite wide, so if you only have a small garden it is really not a viable option. Whereas a woven willow fence need not get any wider than one tree trunk width.
Create a fence out of recycled materials
Another approach is to use recycled materials to create your fence. The list of options is almost endless. There are all kinds of composite materials available, so which you choose is really up to you. If you are the adventurous and experimental type you can even build yourself a tire wall or make one out of bottles. The list of possibilities is almost endless.
Dry stone walling looks really good and can provide habitat for a range of insects. If you are lucky you will find a course available in your area where you can learn the necessary skills to be able to take on a project like this. But, before you do so, stop and think about the time commitment you will be making. Once up it will require maintenance and if you have to buy most of the stone it will not be cheap. Plus, you cannot build a very high wall using this method, so it is not the right approach for everyone
Create a living bamboo fence
Now that you can buy varieties of bamboo that do not send out shoots it is possible to create a fence using living plants. You can learn how to do it here. It will look lovely and not use anything but natural materials which have not been processed at all. However, it will not create any real habitat for wildlife, so is not necessarily the most environmentally of the options I have suggested in this article.
