How to Plant Trees for Backyard Privacy

Protect your backyard privacy with a variety of trees.

Sharing your backyard with invited guests makes for a pleasant social event, even if it's a low-key chat while you're lounging over a cool drink. Sharing the space unwillingly has quite the opposite effect. Whether you wish to avoid prying eyes, uninvited guests or the unnerving passage of traffic through a back alley, planting trees offers an effective long-term solution. Integrate the trees in your backyard's living privacy screen with the overall landscape design to create an attractive space for yourself and welcome guests.

Things You'll Need

• Measuring tape

Instructions

1. Measure your backyard to determine the size of trees that will fit along the property lines. In small urban backyards, the best option may be a single row of trees that grow tall and narrow, leaving space for lawn and flowerbeds. Larger backyards in suburban areas may accommodate trees with a wider spread. An expansive yard, such as those found in many rural areas, is open enough for a multi-layer privacy screen with several types of trees.

2. Select evergreen trees with dense branches and foliage to create a single-row hedge around your property. Fast-growing Leyland cypress, Cupressocyparis leylandii, and arborvitae species, including Thuja occidentalis, are traditional choices for a simple, solid hedge. Holly trees, particularly American holly, Ilex opaca, and Foster holly, Ilex x attenuata, are tolerant of drought, cold weather and poor soil. The added bonus of bright red berries that attract birds and leaves with sharp stickers that discourage intruders make holly trees well-suited to urban privacy screens.

3. Incorporate deciduous trees into your privacy barrier if you have sufficient space. Hedge maple, Acer campestre, and flowering dogwood and crabapple trees provide privacy when fully leafed out and allow more light into the yard during dreary winter months after the leaves have fallen. Callery pear trees, Pyrus calleryana, tolerate the pollution, heat and soil conditions of urban backyards. For a very long or wide backyard, separate your space from neighboring areas with several large weeping willow trees, Salix babylonica.

4. Position clusters of trees with similar soil requirements beside a long property line for year-round interest. An attractive cluster of trees for damp soil areas, for example, may include tall, deciduous bald cypress, Taxodium ascendens; a European alder, Alnus glutinosa; and an evergreen holly. Stagger the trees' spacing so that the view from outside into your backyard is blocked close to the house and around activity areas. Farther away from the house, the spacing can be greater, providing filtered views at the far ends of the backyard.

5. Plant trees that are compatible with your area's climate, checking the U.S. Department of Agriculture Plant Hardiness Zones for each cultivar before you make a purchase. Prepare the planting holes thoroughly, digging them larger than the size of the young trees' root balls and backfilling with a combination of soil and compost. Water the trees routinely during the first two to three years until the roots are established. Monitor your privacy hedge trees for insect infestations and treat any such occurrence promptly to avoid die-back that leave gaps in your living privacy screen.

References

• Virginia Cooperative Extension; Trees for Problem Landscape Sites -- Screening; Bonnie Appleton, et al.; May 2009
• Penn State University Consumer Horticulture Center; Using Trees and Shrubs for Privacy and Wind Screening; Emelie Swackhamer, et al.; July 2004
• "Fine Gardening"; Four Ideas for Screening a Yard; Rosalind Reed
• National Gardening Association: Planting Hedges and Screens