6 Surprising Privacy Plants To Screen Your Garden if You’ve Already Had Enough of Your Annoying Neighbors This Year
When you’re planting for privacy, using layers of airy planting is the smart and stylish DIY solution to screen your backyard from prying neighbors.
Whether you’re tired of nosy neighbors or simply want your garden to feel like a sanctuary from the outside world, now is the time to plant for privacy. Many folk choose to simply raise their boundary fences or plant fast-growing hedges in the pursuit of privacy, but there is a better way to screen a garden that brings style as well as peace from prying eyes to your backyard, and keeps your outside living space feeling open and airy.
Garden designers bring privacy to a backyard by using layers of planting, carefully positioned to screen out sightlines from all around. By combining a well-placed small tree as well as a bed of upright ornamental grasses and a pergola vine with oversized leaves, they create a garden that’s perfectly secluded but feels anything but enclosed. It's a trick you can easily accomplish yourself with the right selection of plants. And it's a far smarter option than planting a line of vigorous arborvitae or leyland cypress that will quickly block views but also leave you so busy pruning that you won’t have time to relax on that beautifully private patio!
Layer up these privacy plants, and bring style and scent as well as screening to your backyard.
Article continues below1. Lollipop Crabapple
Rather than planting trees around your boundary and enclosing your backyard, a privacy solution employed by many garden designers is to carefully position just one in the centre. Siting is all-important: from an upstairs window, mentally draw lines from neighbors’ windows to your patio; the point where they intersect is the magic spot to position your tree.
But the really clever bit? Placing a tree centrally means that it doesn’t need to be as tall as one positioned at a garden boundary to afford the same level of privacy.
A tree that commands such a central spot needs to look fabulous year-round, and my pick is a compact modern crabapple cultivar. Lollipop (Malus ‘Lolizam’) is a dwarf variety from Proven Winners, suitable for zones 4–8 and bred to have a very dense, naturally round crown atop a sturdy trunk. It grows to just 8–10 feet high, so won't outgrow even a small space. Self-pollinating, it has pink buds that open to clouds of fragrant blossom in spring, then lush green leaves for dappled shade in summer; the yellow foliage drops in fall, leaving the branches adorned by tiny red fruit that last all through winter to feed birds.
2. Feather Reed Grass
To screen a backyard seating or dining area, an airy line of tall planting that shifts in the slightest breeze is just as effective as a solid wall. My favorite plant to use in this way is Feather Reed Grass. Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ is much tidier than most ornamental grasses with a compact footprint and a very upright habit, but it still grows quickly up to 6 feet tall. Its feathery flowers bloom earlier than most, too, emerging as pinky plumes then turning blonde and lasting well through winter.
Suitable for zones 4–9, it's widely available and, if you’re considering planting a line as a living screen, Fast Growing Trees offers cost-effective bundles of multiple plants.
3. Yew 'Stonehenge Skinny'
If you want evergreen screening without the bother of pruning, then take a look at the new Stonehenge Skinny Yew. It’s been bred to have an incredibly tight, compact growth habit, reaching 8 feet high and just 1–1½ feet wide, and doesn’t require trimming. This narrow shape means it won’t take up as much room as conventional hedging plants, making Taxus x media ‘Stonehenge Skinny’ a great space-saver for a small garden. Yew is happy in conditions from full sun to deep shade, and this cultivar is suitable for zones 4–7.
As well as adding individual trees at key points to break sightlines, you can plant these columnar trees 2 feet apart to form a skinny privacy hedge.
4. Sweet Potato Vine ‘Marguerite’
For a fast-growing screen of chartreuse-green heart-shaped leaves, plant Ipomoea batatas ‘Marguerite’ in hanging baskets to suspend from pergola struts. The trailing stems of this ornamental sweet potato vine spill 4–9 feet, in full sun or partial shade, creating a vibrant, ever-shifting wall of almost luminous leaves in summer, when you'll be using your garden most often,
Sweet potato vine ‘Marguerite’ couldn’t be easier to grow. It’s not cold-hardy though so, while it can be grown as a perennial in zones 9–11, you’ll need to treat this leafy lovely as an annual – but it’s so cheap, especially if you buy a four-pack of plants from Burpee, that’s not a problem. Lifting the tubers from the hanging baskets, drying then storing them in vermiculite in a frost-free spot over winter to replant the following year is another option. Sweet potato vine's willingness to grow also makes it fun to take cuttings before the first frost, which will easily root in water to be grown as houseplants over winter.
5. Star Jasmine
In a warmer zone, star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) is a wonderful privacy plant to grow, thriving in sun or partial shade and bringing an intense, intoxicating sweet vanilla scent to your seating area. Grow this climber in a wheeled trellised planter such as this 6-feet-high powder-coated metal design from Amazo, and you have yourself a fragrant living privacy screen that you can wheel to wherever you want on your patio.
The other benefit of growing star jasmine in a moveable planter is that you can stretch its suitability for zones 8–11 a notch or two, by rolling it into a sheltered spot against a warming house wall over winter.
With evergreen foliage and tiny white pinwheel flowers, this climber grows to a height of 20 feet but is easily managed and very low-maintenance. There’s no need to prune other than an optional occasional trim to size, though nipping off stem tips once its flowers have faded will encourage denser growth. Once you’ve experienced that honeyed scent, I’ll wager you’ll want to buy another!
6. Honeysuckle ‘Major Wheeler’
If you want to raise the height of a section of your boundary fences without blocking out a ton of sunshine, then Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’ will happily ramble along a fence-top. It's suitable for zones 4–10 and, while many native honeysuckle species are considered invasive, this cultivar quickly reaches 7–10 feet but then stays a manageable size. Hummingbirds will thank you, as they adore its bright coral-red, trumpet-shaped flowers from late spring through late summer.
Attaching an expanding lattice such as this willow frame from Amazon to the fence is the easiest option for support. You’ll need to twist those stems around the support to start with but your plant will soon take over the twining duties.
As it loves an airy position, well-behaved ‘Major Wheeler’ also makes a lovely cloak for a standalone privacy screen. It’s straightforward to DIY, setting a pair of wooden posts into the ground with fast-setting Postloc, available from Amazon, then fixing tensioned steel wires with turnbuckles such as this kit from Amazon between.
