Gardening Services Near You in Uxbridge

Screening is a geometry problem before it is a planting problem. The instinctive response to being overlooked is to make the boundary taller, and it is usually the wrong move: a screen placed close to where people actually sit blocks far more of the view, at a fraction of the height, than the same screen at the far end of the plot. Newer estates around UB8 put houses close together with upper windows looking straight down into neighbouring gardens, and the useful first step is to stand in the spot that feels exposed and work out exactly what is being seen.

Sight lines decide the height

A line drawn from the window doing the overlooking, through the position of the seat or the kitchen door, shows where a screen has to sit and how tall it needs to be. Ten metres closer to the viewer can halve the required height. It also shows what cannot be solved: a screen tall enough to block a second-floor window thirty metres away would cast the entire garden into shade, and an overhead structure with planting on it, or a change of seating position, does the job better. Similar plots a short distance west are covered by gardening throughout West Drayton.

The fast-growing trap

Most disappointment with screening comes from choosing on speed. Leyland cypress and similar conifers reach useful height quickly and then keep going, and because they will not regrow from bare brown wood they cannot be shortened once they have overshot. A slower species that tolerates being cut back to a chosen height indefinitely is a better bargain within about five years. Hornbeam, beech, yew, holly and laurel all take that treatment. Beech and hornbeam hold their dead leaf through winter, which gives most of the screening of an evergreen on a deciduous plant.

Screening above fence height

Where the intrusion comes from an upper window, the useful growth starts at two metres, not at ground level, which is the argument for pleached trees: a clear stem with a trained flat head above it, effectively a hedge on legs, that screens the window without darkening the border beneath. Trained panels of hornbeam or lime on posts and wires do the same in a narrow space. They commit the garden to a fixed annual cut, since a pleached form left for two seasons stops being one.

What a fence will and will not hold

Trellis added to the top of a panel is only as strong as the post it is fixed to, and a mature climber on an extended panel turns the whole thing into a sail that goes over in the first serious gale. Posts carrying any added height want setting deeper than standard, and a heavy evergreen climber wants its own wires and fixings rather than the fence. Planting held tight against the base of a fence or a shed also creates an unbroken covered run along a boundary, and where that has been taken up by something the answer lies with our pest control in Uxbridge. Old panels, trellis and conifer stumps taken out to make room are not garden waste in any useful sense and leave by vehicle in the way man and van specialists in Perivale shifts an awkward load.

Getting a screen to establish

A screen is planted into a prepared trench rather than a row of individual pits, which is what allows roots to run and the line to grow evenly. Bare-root stock between late autumn and early spring is far cheaper for any quantity and establishes faster. Spacing is decided by species and by the finished height wanted, and a staggered double row fills faster than a single line where there is width for it. Watering has to continue through two summers, not one, and the tips are shortened from the first year so the base furnishes instead of running straight up. A screen put in before a household actually moves into a house gains a full season, which is why the planting is often timed against removals specialists in Uxbridge.

Arranging the work

Screening is quoted as a project: the trench, the stock, the planting and the first season's aftercare, with any posts and wires priced separately, and the maintenance cut afterwards charged by visit. A site visit is worth more than photographs here, because the sight lines have to be read from indoors as well as from the garden. The recurring cut it commits the garden to is described at our garden maintenance team.