Landscaping Ideas To Hide Utility Boxes: Tips On Hiding Utility Boxes With Plants

Utility Box Surrounded By Plants And Vines
utility box
(Image credit: HoleInTheBucket)

No matter how carefully you landscape your garden, there are some things you just can’t get away from. Utility boxes for things like electricity, cable, and phone lines are the perfect example of this. Unless there are some ways to hide utility boxes, though. Keep reading to learn more about camouflaging utility boxes in the yard.

Landscaping Around Utility Boxes

If you have plans to live off the grid, they’re a fact of life, and they, unfortunately, aren’t usually designed with aesthetics in mind. The best you can do is try to live in harmony with them. The very first thing you need to do when landscaping around utility boxes is to call the company that installed them.

These boxes are serious business, and there are often restrictions about what you can do near them, like bans on permanent structures and distances before you can plant anything. Make sure to follow these restrictions – the companies need access and underground wires need room to run free of roots. That being said, there are ways to hide utility boxes that don’t conflict with any restrictions.

Ways to Hide Utility Boxes

If you can’t plant anything within a certain distance of your utility box, put up a trellis or fence just beyond that distance that falls between the box and the place you’re most likely to view it from. Plant a fast-growing, flowering, vine-like clematis or trumpet vine to fill in the space and distract the eye.

You can achieve the same effect by planting a row of shrubs or small trees. If you are allowed to plant near or around the box, select flowers of varying colors, heights, and bloom times.

If the landscaping around utility boxes is interesting enough, you may not even realize there’s something ugly in the middle of it.

Liz Baessler
Senior Editor

The only child of a horticulturist and an English teacher, Liz Baessler was destined to become a gardening editor. She has been with Gardening Know how since 2015, and a Senior Editor since 2020. She holds a BA in English from Brandeis University and an MA in English from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. After years of gardening in containers and community garden plots, she finally has a backyard of her own, which she is systematically filling with vegetables and flowers.