Beauty and Privacy For Crowded Yards

A backyard is a wonderful luxury, it is a piece of land, an outdoor aspect to your home, which allows you to impose your design will on the natural world. However if you have a small, crowded backyard, with neighbors bearing down on you from every side, that little plot of land becomes a lot less desirable, to use, or care for. Luckily there are a variety of attractive and easy ways to create a little privacy and serenity in even the most cramped back yard.

The most obvious method for increasing privacy is to install a fence. There are a variety of structures which can be installed to stand between you and the outside world, including brick, hardwood, and wire metal fences, which can be sized as tall and as expansively as you like. The problem with these options is that they aren’t exactly subtle. They stick out as man made structures, with an obvious purpose, to keep neighbors out. This can negatively impact both the natural beauty of the entire neighborhood, and might even offend some of the people living around you.

The use of natural plants and growing, or living, fences is another way to separate your property from that of those around you. Shrub fences are probably the most common living fence application used today, consisting of just a free standing row of shrubs, densely packed together. The benefit of this is that the shrubs are so dense, that it is difficult for nosy neighbors to peer through them into your home. They are also natural, living things, so rather than blatantly sticking out in the space, they will actually enhance the beauty and ambiance of the area. There are a wide variety of decorative shrubs available, including flowering crabapple, lilacs, and redbuds, which gives you some options when choosing the exact plant to use.

A variation on this method is to use tiny dwarf trees to create your fence. Types of trees available include small evergreens, dwarf plum trees, and Japanese Maples. The problem with using trees is that each fall, the leaves will turn a beautiful color, and fall to the ground. While this may be lovely for a day or two, eventually you will have to pull out a rake and have at those leafy rascals.

One way to combine man made structures with natural living beauty is to use trellises with hanging vines running up and down the side of them. These vines can be trained to grow up over the holes in the wooden trellis, providing you with some protection from wandering eyes. There are a wide variety of vines that can be selected from as well, including rosebushes, honey suckle, and passion flower vines.

Adding a little privacy to your back yard doesn’t have to involve building towering, architectural structures, or gaudy castle style eye sores on your property. There are a wide variety of relatively simple measures that can be taken to create attractive, subtle, lawn enhancing applications, which will shield you and your family in safety, without offending the neighbors.

This article was provided courtesy of PebbleZ’s line of absorbent stone beverage coasters, and was written and researched by natural stone artist Joey Pebble