Whether you have a narrow city lot or are in a rural area with acreage, your home and garden should be a place where you can relax and enjoy your time outside. Creating boundaries with landscaping helps provide privacy from neighbors, reduces noise levels from busy roads, and can enhance or frame views.
Privacy from Neighbors
This is typically one of the main goals our clients have when they come to us. Even if you have the nicest of neighbors, we all want our own space to have to ourselves from time to time. There are various levels of privacy that can be achieved and will depend on whether you want complete privacy from neighbors, need only specific areas blocked from view, or if you’re just needing to delineate the border between one property and the other. You’ll want to consider the areas that you commonly sit, dine, or entertain in while outside and if those spaces are affected by or can be seen by your neighbors. If they have a deck located on their second floor that looks down on a patio or hot tub space, that would be an opportunity to provide privacy. Sometimes neighbors will have very harsh or poorly aimed lighting which is another chance to add in screening. On the other hand, if you aren’t trying to put up a proverbial wall between you and your neighbor, getting on the same page with them about the type of boundary you’d both like to see between your 2 properties is the best place to start. Using materials & plants that both properties can benefit from and leaving openings for views of mountains, lakes, etc will set you up for success. The type of relationship you have with your neighbors is good information to share with your designer so they can know what type of privacy screening to adequately plan for.
Noise Reduction
Being strategic about where landscape elements are placed and which combo of them to use is key to noise reduction tactics in the design process. Having some type of barrier to block the line of sight between your outdoor space and the noise source (i.e. street, neighbor, playground, etc) will be the best place to start. Solid fencing or walls are typically the fastest option but if you combine that with a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs, you’ll have a much more effective, and more aesthetically pleasing, noise buffer especially if they can add height. It might seem counterintuitive to add in more noise, but placing a white noise element close by, such as a water feature, will help drown out the unwanted noise. A portable Bluetooth speaker or a permanent outdoor speaker system is another option for adding noise that helps distract from the unwanted noise. Depending on your property’s topography, a sunken patio space or berming can be a creative way to muffle noise but can be costly due to the potential need for retaining walls. Using a combination approach will yield the best results when trying to mitigate unwanted noise.
Framing a View
While many privacy and screening features are placed along property lines, when we’re framing or enhancing a view, these landscape elements create not just boundaries but also focal points and connections to the surrounding parts of the garden. Living in the Pacific Northwest means that we get spectacular views of Mount Rainier, the sound, the city skyline, and a plethora of other sights (not to mention the sunsets) that we can “borrow”. Trees and shrubs or arbors and gates can be placed to frame mountains or other viewpoints in the distance from specific areas in the garden. Borrowing views can also give the illusion of extra space and make your garden feel bigger than it actually is. These same landscape elements can also be used to frame in-garden views such as art pieces, a specimen plant, a water feature, or a different area of the garden creating garden rooms. You can spark interest and curiosity with a combination of framed views and well-placed screening and paths throughout the garden which encourage you to explore further.
Creating a boundary with landscaping can make your outdoor space feel secluded, quiet, and like your own sanctuary where you can escape from it all. The best and most effective screening will typically be a multi-pronged approach that uses a combination of hardscaping, plant materials with varying heights, and takes your and your neighboring property’s topography and site conditions into account. To read more about different options for creating privacy, read our past blog post here.
~Colleen
