How to Hide Utility Boxes With Plants

Use plants to create a living screen to hide utility boxes.

A well-planned home landscape design offers homeowners numerous benefits besides increasing the overall worth of the property. These benefits include lowering your home's interior temperatures through planting trees to provide shade to your home in the summer and other plants to hold heat in through the winter. Other benefits include creating private living areas, blocking out street noises or hiding unsightly views of things such as utility boxes. Use plants to create a full or partial screen to either hide or blend these boxes into the design.

Instructions

1. Contact all of your local utility companies to mark all underground utilities before digging any planting holes. Inquire about any specific regulations concerning plantings around the utility boxes.

2. Select plants to hide the boxes depending on the space available for planting, height needed for coverage and the landscape design surrounding the area. Pick plants that fit the overall landscape design.

3. Use low shrubs to partially hide the utility box and blend it into the landscape, or medium and large size shrubs to completely hide the box from view.

4. Space the plants according to the expected mature size. Find this information on the plant's markers or inquire about this when purchasing them.

5. Choose evergreen varieties of plants for color and coverage year round. Combine evergreen with deciduous types of shrubs for a varied look.

6. Plant groupings of either mounding or tall upright perennials around the utility box to conceal it from view. Select plant varieties without flowers to prevent bees in the area.

Tips & Warnings

• Grow several plants in single rows surrounding the box or on the sides that are viewable.

• Stagger plants in two rows or use various heights, colors and textures of plants to hide the utility box.

• Maintain an area around the utility box that is easily accessible to the utility workers. Trim the plants as needed to allow plenty of room for workers to access the box when needed.

• Select plants, shrubs and trees that don't have thorns and varieties with flexible branches that will withstand being bent when workers are accessing the utility box.

References

• University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Home Landscape Design
• University of Florida: Plant Selection and Landscape Design
• Learn 2 Grow: Design by Function: Utility Screening

Resources

• Clemson Cooperative Extension; Landscape Renovation; Gary Forrester; February 2008
• Virginia Cooperative Extension; Trees for Landscape Screening; Bonnie Appleton, et al.; May 2009