Do you get on with your neighbours? Most of us would like to say yes, but it is human nature to be irritated by certain things about those closest to us. Increased traffic or noise, or even just an aversion to change may lead to issues, and one area which often leads to problems is that of shared boundaries.
Some problems can simply be avoided by knowing exactly where the boundary is and, where there is a wall, fence or hedge, knowing who that “belongs” to and who is responsible for the maintenance of it. If the responsibility is yours you may have a right to access to carry out essential maintenance, but it is always worth having a discussion with the neighbour to come to an agreement about this.
If trees or other vegetation on or near the boundary cause dispute, you are probably aware that you have the right to prune any growth which overhangs onto your side of the boundary, such as an overhanging tree branch, but did you know that you must offer the prunings back, otherwise you could be accused of theft? However, if you simply throw the prunings back into your neighbour’s garden and they land on something, causing damage, you could also be liable for that. However, if you had not pruned off the overhanging branch, and it broke off in a storm and damaged something on your side of the boundary, your neighbour may be liable for the damage!
Clearly this is a thorny subject (no pun intended), but if you find yourself in a dispute with a neighbour you really should seek professional legal advice, but every site-owner should have a basic awareness of their responsibilities and liabilities. One aspect of this that customers come to us for every day on the nursery is when privacy and screening is involved. Overlooking windows, to provide privacy from communal areas of your site, to reduce light pollution, or any one or combination of other factors may lead to tension with people neighbouring your site, but the legal situation there isn’t always as simple as you might think. Under current English law no-one has the right to a view and even the “right to light” isn’t as clear cut as it used to be.
As is often the case, there is no one single ideal solution to providing screening for privacy as so many factors will dictate the possibilities. But, as well as the physical and aesthetic limitations of what could you grow there, with a little consideration and common sense it is also worth thinking about what should you grow?
Trees and other vegetation for screening unwanted views, for security, and for providing privacy from neighbours, amount to a significant percentage of the enquiries we handle on the nursery on a day to day basis and there are a number of ways to tackle the issue of privacy.
For ground-floor eye-level issues a six foot fence or wall is fine, but you would normally need planning permission to erect anything much taller than this. You could plant a hedge, but two or more evergreens planted closely enough together as to form a solid screen could potentially be actionable under the “high hedge legislation” (which was actually an amendment to the Anti-Social Behaviour Act, 2003) if they are allowed to grow above two metres, particularly if they cast shade on a neighbour’s property, so providing privacy can prove more challenging than at first thought.
One unusual solution to privacy problems might be the use of “pleached” trees. Pleaching is an old term which relates to the training of trees into unusual shapes for a particular purpose (for instance there is reference to an avenue of pleached fruit trees in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), but these days it is largely used when a tree or large shrub is trained horizontally on tiers or fanned out on a flat panel, above a tall clear stem, to give a two-dimensional effect, rather like a narrow hedge on a stick! This allows dense screening above a wall or fence without taking up as much space as a solid hedge or unclipped tree might.
On our nursery we pleach all sorts of different trees, and we even use “standard” trained evergreen shrubs such as Laurel to produce evergreen screening when the job is appropriate for it, but by far our most popular pleached tree is Hornbeam. Carpinus betulus, or Common Hornbeam, is ideal for pleaching as its branches are pliable and easy to train (as long as training is carried out at the right time of year that is), is not too slow growing but isn’t problematically vigorous, easily forms a dense, twiggy mass when regularly pruned, is hardy, and tolerates a wide range of soil conditions. Hornbeam grows well on heavy soils, even tolerating short periods of waterlogging, especially during winter, making it a good choice on sites too wet for the majority of evergreens. It has soft leaves with a vivid apple-green colour in spring, which turn golden-yellow in autumn. However, the one feature of Hornbeam which really makes it popular as a pleached tree for screening is its “ever-brown” property, more properly called marcescence. By that I mean that it retains a percentage of the dead leaves during winter, a bit like a Beech hedge does, although Hornbeam comes into new leaf much earlier in spring than Beech does, is better suited to heavy soils than Beech, tends to be more flexible for training, and is faster growing than Beech. Like Beech, this winter leaf retention only happens in the juvenile stage of growth, so regular pruning is required to maintain this, and the leaf retention varies from one plant to another, and can also be lessened on more exposed sites, but nonetheless this “ever-brown” property is very useful for screening, but it is still essentially a deciduous plant and as such is largely exempt from the legislation which might potentially restrict evergreen hedges.
Pictured: Pleached Hornbeam trees avoid the potential legal issues of evergreens (pictured here changing from green to gold to brown in autumn and planted above a lower evergreen hedge of scented Osmanthus).
At Wykeham Mature Plants we’ve been supplying the holiday park industry with high quality large trees, specimen shrubs, instant hedging and screening plants for over forty five years. With decades of hands-on experience in supplying instant transformations, we will help you to create planting schemes tailored to the site conditions and to the requirements of your business. The nursery is located in a frost pocket near Scarborough; our Yorkshire-grown stock is guaranteed to be hardy and, as a nursery that has achieved the prestigious Plant Healthy certification, you can rest assured that it is free from imported pests and diseases.
For further information visit http://www.wykehammatureplants.co.uk”www.wykehammatureplants.co.uk. Alternatively, to discuss site visits and planting services (for sites located within a hundred miles or so from the nursery) email mailto:m.howe@wykeham.co.uk”m.howe@wykeham.co.uk .
