the council has cut down the overgrowth behind my garden and now everyone on the hill behind my house can see into my bedroom window and the birds have nowhere to sit and eat like they used to.
im looking for a fast growing, bushy thing to protect our privacy and give the birds somewhere to hide and something to eat.
it would be planted in a planter on top of a wall that's about five foot high, so ideally something that's bushy but not too tall (about a foot or two?) and something that can be in a pot or a long planter.
any and all suggestions welcome!
by gooseinthegarden
3 Comments
That appears to be buddleia, has it been completely removed or just winter pruned? If pruned it’ll be back in a year or so.
You won’t have sufficient soil to maintain growth on there, how will you water it? Better to grow something along a trellis from inside the garden.
Is it on the wall in the photo that you want to place a planter – or on a lower wall that’s not visible?
If it’s the wall in the photo – placing anything on there, that would grow a few feet and give privacy, is likely to cause you problems. Apart from watering, it could well topple over!
If it’s a lower wall, it’d take a long while to grow up and give you screening privacy like you had before, and if it’s self-supporting (e.g. a tree) it’d bush out significantly and take up a lot of space. (It might just be possible with bamboo – but in a planter it’d need a lot of watering!)
I think you’d be better to attach panels to the back wall – something like in the attached photo -to give you privacy like you had before and then you could have climbers (growing from planters on the ground) that would grow up the wall and onto the panels. (For example, Jasmine is fast growing and some are evergreen)
Then, you could also have some small trees/bushes in planters if you think they’d be needed for the birds
https://preview.redd.it/7i26ssfwtu1g1.png?width=1345&format=png&auto=webp&s=2feee540b280ee4073fa28f0686e271148f07e2f
I always recommend sedum confusum because it is bomb proof and I’ve grown it in window boxes without ever watering it. It won’t be terrible high but it’ll not need any attention and you can grow it from bits snapped off the main plant. Make sure you use well drained planters (drainage holes and free draining soil eg mix some grit in).