hedge

brightboys322

I need to grow a hedge at the bottom of my garden to give privacy from a neighbour who spends a lot of time looking into my garden and trying to keep me chatting.  It needs to be about eight feet high minimum but I don't want it too deep and take up all the space in my border.  My garden is about sixty feet long.  Does anyone have any suggestions regarding which plants would be suitable please.

Cambridgerose12

You're best off with a dense hedge that does not lose all its leaves in winter. But pretty much any hedge will take up a fair amount of room, because you have the width of the mature hedge (going on for 180cm at the base), plus you need to add some space (about 45cm) alongside it to allow for clipping and to ensure the other plants in your border aren't killed.

There's also the consideration that a hedge will take at least 5 years to develop into the sort of really good screen that you need. So you might want to consider a fence with trellis on the top, either as a temporary backdrop to your young hedge plants, or as a permanent feature which you then clothe with climbers.

My suggestion for hedging plants would be things like Prunus laurocerasus, evergreen Euonymus, holly, or beech. Yew is also lovely and has perhaps the best effect when fully-grown, but it is hard to prevent it from affecting plants in front of it. Beech isn't evergreen but by trimming it as a hedge, you keep the juvenile growth on, which doesn't fall in winter.

brightboys322

Many thanks for your suggestion - they are very helpful 

Dovefromabove

Remember that a hedge will need trimming from each side ... this will mean that you 

a.  ask your neighbour to trim his side, if willing, and rely on him to do it properly

or

b. you seek permission from your neighbour to go into his garden and trim your hedge, making yourself available for neighbourly conversation 2 or 3 times a year. 

Bear in mind that , with either of the above options, if your neighbour moves you will be relying on the new neighbour to continue to allow you to trim the hedge, or you will have to trust him/her to do it. 

or

c.  You plant your hedge far enough into your property to give yourself plenty of space to trim the far side without trespassing on the neighbour's property ... ( of course you will need to have something that indicates the actual boundary line or you may cause confusion in future) and when trimming that side you will still be making yourself available for neighbourly conversation.