We want that screening soon, so fast-growing trees are used. Usually that screening is needed all year round, so we rely on dense evergreens to create it. Most of us want to live our family-life in private, so separating our gardens from the ones next door is a common priority. Unless you live out in a rural area, you probably have neighbors right beside you. We build our house from the foundations up, and in the garden there are different kinds of foundations needed – let’s take a look: Hedges and Privacy Screening
Take care of your foundations, and the rest will take care of itself. Once you have a good frame, you can plant almost anything you want, and it will look great. That frame is what Foundation Plants do for the various forms and colors of the many plants we bring into our gardens. But if your children scrawl over your walls with Crayola, put a frame around it and call it art. If you just fill your garden with a random selection of plants you like the look of, the result will be uncertain and disordered. Build a framework for your garden, and then add the rest of your plants. If you are creating a new garden, this is where you need to begin. In a more traditional garden, they might be clipped into neat hedges or rounded specimens, but there are also naturally-compact plants, that need no clipping, for a less formal and lower-maintenance look. They will normally have green leaves – green in all its diversity of tones and depth – to make a neutral background for the colored shrubs and flowering shrubs that will fill the beds in the rest of your garden. Typically, Foundation Plants are evergreens of both the broad-leaf and conifer kinds, depending on your taste and your climate.
This would include hedges big and small clipped plants used as accents and to define spaces the pair of plants used to flank a doorway or a gateway trees for avenues and yes, those rounded evergreens, often clipped, that blend the hard, vertical geometry of a house into the softer informal shapes of the landscape in the main garden. The name Foundation Plants is sometimes used just for plants put around your house to literally hide the foundations, but they are better thought of as the structural plants used all through the garden. Just as a home must be built on strong foundations if it is to last, a garden too needs strong foundations to give it structure and form.