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Why You Should Have Hedges in Your Landscape
from: Lawn and Garden MagicThere are a whole lot more than four reasons to include hedges in your landscaping design, but let's cover the main four -- privacy, beauty, mark boundaries and windbreakers. Whatever your reason for putting in hedges, prepare yourself for high maintenance. Hedges must be taken care of if they're going to look good and provide the beauty and purpose you're looking for. If you're choosing a hedge for a more formal look, be prepared to put a fair bit of time into maintenance. Flowering hedges should be pruned about once a year and allowed to grow in their natural shape.
Privacy is one of the main reasons many people choose to have a hedge. If you live in an urban area, hedges are a great alternative to a fence. You can even make it intruder proof by just selecting the right plant, and you can keep it at whatever height you choose. Some hedges will grow up to ten feet or more, and can be trimmed down to whatever best suits your needs.
Hedges are dense which makes it hard for intruders or animals to get through. Some hedges have thorns as a further way to discourage anyone from trying to get through. Good plants to use for a security hedge are Holly and Hawthorne. The Hawthorne has white blooms which are followed by bright red berries that usually last through the winter. Both have lots of nasty thorns and thus provide an excellent barrier against unwanted intruders. On top of that, these two types of hedges can grow to at least 12 feet.
Beauty is another very good reason to plant hedges since they can will give color all year. They'll provide you with beautiful flowering shrubs in the spring and beautiful autumn colors, red, bronze and orange in the fall. You can also choose flowering hedges so that flowers will bloom at different times of the spring and summer, and in winter, they may also have colorful berries.
Informal flowering hedges can be integrated into a mixed border that doesn’t have to be of uniform shape. Plant them for their blooms and aromas and they'll require low maintenance. Formal clipped hedges make a huge impact on your landscape. They can be shaped and also give dimension to an otherwise normal landscape.
Formal or informal hedges make beautiful backgrounds for other plants, provide walking paths and can help prevent soil erosion. Try using both and placing them in strategic areas of your lawn. Small hedges lining walkways and driveways are very popular these days as well as the formal hedge clipped in a straight line. Formal hedges can divide large lawn spaces into smaller enclosed garden rooms, quiet little nooks to provide you with a private place to relax.
Hedges are a great way to mark boundaries between properties and can be used successfully in both the country and in the city. Many country estates have well-maintained hedges to mark boundary lines since they're much more attractive, last longer than a wooden fence and can be trimmed to any height required for privacy.
In the city, hedges for boundaries are usually a line of hedges between one driveway and another property. This gives you a boundary line that can be counted on for a good number of years. You should remember, when planting hedges for boundaries to never encroach on your neighbor's land. Since hedge plants grow outward as well as upward, make sure you give them plenty of room on your neighbor’s side. Hedges, as opposed to wooden or chain link fences, are definitely more pleasing to the eye, are just as effective in marking boundaries and they increase the beauty of your lawn.
Hedges are often used as windbreakers for practical reasons in rural areas. These hedges are normally trees and the best trees good for windbreaks are beech trees, hemlock, evergreen and fir trees, all of which provide good windbreaks in areas of the country that are flat and have nothing to break the wind and snow from assaulting a home.
These trees can also be used as barriers against traffic noise and debris. It's interesting to note that using trees as windbreaks against the destructive force of wind against a solid wall or fence can allow the wind to jump right over it with the same amount of strength. Using a hedge cushions the force of the wind and decreases its strength.
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