Climbers and Screening Plants
Posted on March 06, 2018
Climbers and Screening Plants
At Semken Landscaping we get asked all the time to screen and block out the neighbours. In the past this would be solved easily with the installation of a hedge and, hey presto, in a year or two you have a lovely soft green screen and no neighbours in sight. Increasingly however, this is becoming harder and harder to achieve using hedges with suburban gardens getting smaller and garden beds consequently getting narrower.
Now don’t get me wrong, hedges have a time and place, and if there’s room, we love hedges in the garden.
So, what is the alternative screen solution for tight spaces and smaller gardens? Screens. Not just any screens however, green screens. More specifically climbers and screening plants trained to climb up purpose built structures- we love to train them onto custom built screens made from cypress and rio. Green screens are space savvy, look great, allow airflow, are a cheap alternative to decorative “art screens” and best of all a green screen gives you the same lush and cooling greenery feel in a garden that a hedge would.
Our recommendations for screening plants:
Evergreen
We can’t go past Star Jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) to create a fast-growing evergreen screen that will quickly screen off that ugly wall or the view into your neighbour’s bathroom. Bonus points for the mass covering of sweetly perfumed white flowers over the spring and summer period.
Deciduous
Deciduous climbers are invaluable in situations where you are looking for shade in summer but would still like some filtered light to shine through over the darker winter period. Climbers such as Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) or Ornamental Grape (Vitus spp.) are both fabulous for this reason and both have lovely green foliage, turning to a crimson in autumn months. Boston Ivy tends to be more contained over the growing months and requires less trimming which is why we generally use it more than the Ornamental Grape, either way you can’t go wrong with these climbers.
