Are you ready to breathe new life into your garden fence? This post is all about how you can turn that plain old fence into a captivating focal point by implementing a few simple landscaping strategies! The opportunity for creating beautiful landscaping along a fence line is often missed, leaving homeowners with a lackluster patch of grass beneath their fence. However, with the right tips, anyone can transform their fence line and enhance the aesthetic appeal of their yard.
Take your fence line from boring to beautiful with these easy landscaping tips and ideas!
Tips for landscaping along a fence line
Define your goals
As you begin planning a garden along your fence line, consider your goals for your garden. Do you want to create privacy? Do you want to add some color? Do you want your fence line to feel more cohesive with the rest of your yard? Do you just want to reduce the amount of lawn you need to mow?
Prepare the area
Prepare your garden by removing the grass and define the edges of your garden. Tools like a hoe and a pickax are great for ripping up grass and work more efficiently than a shovel! I know because we have spent countless hours ripping up grass to make room for gardens😂.
Once you’ve removed the grass, level the soil. If you plan on adding mulch, which would be my recommendation, you should make sure that your leveled surface is sufficiently lower than the bottom of your fence. Once you’ve added your mulch, you should still have a slight gap between the bottom of your fence and the top of the mulch. If the bottom of your fence is buried in mulch, it may start to rot, if it is made from wood.
Here’s another preparation tip: if you’re planning on adding mulch, add landscape fabric. This step is a big timesaver if you live in a warmer climate, where weeds grow rapidly for most of the year. Before we invested in high quality landscape fabric, we devoted hours every other week to weeding. Now, we barely need to weed throughout growing season. We live in zone 8 for reference.
Ideas for creating an enchanting fence line garden
Now that you have defined your fence line garden goals and prepared the area, it’s time to figure out which plants you should add to your garden. Here are some ideas to help you out!
Grow fruit and add interest to a boring fence with this technique
Espalier is a horticultural technique that has existed for approximately a millennia, originating in Ancient Rome. Certain woody plants can be grown in desired shapes through a combination of pruning techniques and training branches along wires. One benefit to this technique is that fruit can be produced, while maintaining the tree in a compact form. You can espalier fruit trees to create privacy along a simple wire fence, with the added benefits of growing your own fruit and creating an intriguing fence. If you want year-round foliage along your fence, camellias are another great candidate to espalier.
Add a romantic touch to your fence landscaping with rambling roses
Rambling roses are the perfect romantic touch for your garden fence. As they grow, your roses will spill over the top of your fence and poke between the spaces in a picket fence, creating a whimsical feel to your garden. In fact, you can really never go wrong by adding more roses to your garden. If you’d like lower maintenance roses, opt for an older variety.
Hydrangeas are the perfect companion for a white picket fence
No flower feels more quintessentially New England than hydrangeas. This is for good reason. Hydrangeas thrive in cooler climates, by the sea, where they can get plenty of sun without their leaves burning and their flowers wilting. The farther south you try to plant a hydrangea in its range, the more effort you need to put into its care. In addition to creating a classic aesthetic, planting hydrangeas along a white picket fence can add an extra layer of privacy to your yard in the summer months.
Spring bulbs provide a pop of color underneath a simple split rail fence
Try planting spring bulbs underneath a rustic split rail fence to add a pop of color to your fence in the spring, and save yourself some tricky mowing in the summer.
Dress up a plain chain fence with a gorgeous flowering climber
Here is the perfect idea to add a bit of glamour to an ordinary chain fence – train roses or a similar climbing, flowering vine to grow along it!
Mix perennials of varying heights in front of your fence to create depth
The key to creating a beautiful perennial garden against a fence is proper layering. You want a few of the highest plants to be at the back, mixed in with a few slightly shorter plants. The middle layer should consist of a few taller plants (yet not as high as the layer closest to the fence) and a few plants that are slightly smaller than the others in this layer. The front layer should be low plants, some of which spill over the edge of the garden.
Add evergreens along your fence for year-round interest
Evergreens are a great way to add year-round interest and privacy to your yard. Add a variety of evergreens to your fence line garden for a mix of textures, heights, and shades of green. The last thing you want to do is add a row of only Thuja Green Giants, or a row of any single plant variety for that matter. While this might provide an effective screen, you won’t have dimensionality in your garden and it can actually make your yard look smaller. Mix a few bulbs or perennials into your garden for a bit of fun color.
Enhance a rustic fence with climbing roses and a perennial garden
When in doubt add more roses and colorful spring flowers! You can never go wrong landscaping a fence line, if your garden design includes roses and pretty perennials. This combination is a low maintenance way to create a stunning garden that will add interest to your yard from spring to fall. Add some lavender to your fence line garden to help keep pests away from your roses and to add inviting scent to your garden.
Create a pretty landscaped corner of your fence
Dress up the corner of your fence. As we discussed earlier, when planning a garden against a fence, it is important to consider the heights of the plants in your garden. For the two plants that oppose each other, next to a corner, choose bushier plants. For the plant that will go in the corner, choose one with a taller, narrower habit, that can either spill over the fence or add vertical interest in that spot.
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