not Leylandii, it grows to quick. Something to screen out my neighbours garden, but doesn’t grow too quick.

Ta

privet is the traditional option. some hedges round our way are beech, which means the leaves go brown – and sometimes they drop off too.

if you want secure as well as screening, try something prickly like berberis or holly, both of which are also pretty ornamental with the flowers & then the berries

Beech. Yew. Laurel. Hawthorn.

Beech: Slow growing, looks great, trim it and it’ll retain (brown) leaves through the winter.

Yew: Very slow growing, but evergreen, easy to trim, and WILL block out your neighbours.

Laurel: Fairly fast growing, but easy to control and evergreen.

Hawthorn: Fairly fast growing, but easy to control. Will be partially see through in winter. Thorns will keep anything bigger than a hedgehog out. Triming will drop said tyre poppers all over the place.

Got all 4 in our garden, and the only one I want rid of is the more prolific hawthorn, but only because it’s not so nice in the winter.

Beech for sure. That’ll keep the neighbours out of sight.

Or Yew

How much room is there for it? What I mean is how wide and high do you want it to be?

You can have some wee hedges or you can have some monsters.

We’ve planted a mix of various native hedge plants, about 6 different ones. Should be nice when it grows. You can’t beat a bit of beech but ours didn’t take, maybe wrong soil so I replaced those with hornbeam. Looks the same to me but it seems happier. It does grow pretty slowly so you really need to splash out on some fairly mature plants, though.

Holly is a good option, although it does grow quite fast, and seeds itself all over your garden very easily. Also grows quite fast.

Berberis doesn’t make for a very dense hedge, and fights back like a cornered leopard when you trim it!

Privet- boring but effective. And once it’s got its shape it’s dead easy to look after.

I don’t have any suggestions but the wildlife will thank you for it. 🙂

Make sure you put some bird feeders out too!

A few thoughts as I have been researching this area.

If you read Monty Don he will tell you not to be seduced by mature plants. The theory being a mature plant takes longer to recover from being moved than a younger one and as a result a younger one will soon catch up and cost considerably less.

Growth is dependent upon how you look after it much more than plant type.

Beech tends to thrive on chalk and other well draining soil, hornbeam thrives well where beech often does not.

The best way of finding out what works is to go round your area looking at what hedging plants have been used – especially in older properties.

Cheers

I dont want anything with thorns as we have young kids.

Also, I’m not green fingered, but I am lazy, so I need something that’s going to take little maintenance without growing like crazy

Moon on a stick?

The nearest to a moon-on-a-stick option would be Thuja plicata/Western Red Cedar – coniferous, looks a bit like Leylandii but grows slower. And unlike Leylandii you can prune it hard and it will regenerate so if it does get too big you can still get a decent hedge back rather than a row of stumps.

We were looking at leylands, for a 25M long screen in front of a big wall but went for laurels instead. We have some leylands elsewhere in the garden that the prev owner let get too big (8′ thick & 20′ high) the problem is, if you cut back past the greenery it doesn’t grow back so we’re stuck with about 80 frikkin 8′ thick trees that when you look down on them from above look shocking cos we had to top them as they were too tall.

Leylandii is a bugger if it gets holed- we’ve got a block of them at the bottom of the garden, one of them lost a branch last winter and that’s it for the duration- big ugly hole that’ll take years to regrow. Bummer.

Native hedging is great and cheap at this time of year.

Personal pref would incl. hawthorn and maybe a sloe bush or two – Damsons as well.

I wouldn’t rule out stuff with thorns, the kids will only get the odd scratch and learn a lesson. Yew on the other hand could kill them.

I’ve just planted a Photinia hedge which I hope will look good without much effort. Chosen for appearance and because it is evergreen.