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.

A climber-covered trellis screens ‘Hedge House’ itself from its garden.Credit: Rory Gardiner

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.

Naturalistic screen planting has also been incorporated in the grounds of ‘Nine’, a new residential development in Sydney which has just won an award for excellence at 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 apartment buildings, to create privacy in courtyards and to shield residents from the street.

At ‘Hedge House’ trees, shrubs and climbers are strategically placed to create a sense of privacy.Credit: Rory Gardiner

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.”

Naturalistic screening at a new housing development in Sydney.Credit: Simon Wood

You have to walk through a tunnel-like opening in it to get to the front garden, after which, the deeper into the block you go, the screening becomes steadily looser. A naturalistic grove of Allocasuarina littoralis blocks a view of a neighbouring house, while a mix of Dodonaea viscosa, Bursaria spinosa, various wattles and other indigenous trees and shrubs are used to frame – rather than obscure – much-wanted views of adjoining public bushland.

Espaliered lemons and a passionfruit vine screen other views of a neighbouring house, while steel trellis (designed by architecture firm Studio Bright) covered in Parthenocissus henryana visually screens Hedge House itself from its garden. This deciduous climber also serves to shade – and help cool – the interior of the house in summer while letting light through in winter.

If there is not a regular pattern the rhythm of the whole screen is not lost should an individual plant fail to thrive. Credit: Simon Wood

“With climate change and biodiversity loss I think there is a growing interest in using a mix of different species for screening,” Hicks says. “I prioritise using local plants, but I rarely use them 100 per cent of the time.”

Coxall, who also uses many indigenous plants, has designed naturalistic screens to variously frame, filter and all-out obscure different aspects of the Nine gardens. He, like Hicks, keeps animal habitat in mind: “This site is part of a corridor of movement for birds and other wildlife, it’s incredibly important.”

As for anyone wanting to introduce screening at home, it’s important to consider your soil type, as well as the different microclimates across your site, before choosing plants. You should also take note of the plants’ height, density and spread and how much pruning will be required to keep them to the size you require.

Be mindful of the fact that screens can change the way light falls and that while you might want plants to block sun in summer, you might be seeking light in winter. By selecting plants that together strike the right balance between a sense of enclosure and expansiveness your garden can feel good to be in all year round.

Finally, be patient. No new plant will provide instant coverage of everything you want to hide. Hicks says that at ‘Hedge House’ she used a mix of small seedlings and semi-established plants to ensure that at least some of the screening a “had a presence” within a year.

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