Long before the advent of pressure-treated lumber, vinyl and metal options, landowners were building fences from various plants, trees and shrubs. In Britain, hedge-building has a strong and celebrated legacy. Some hedgerows — usually anchored by hawthorns planted close to one another — are centuries old, and organizations like the English Hedgerow Trust exist solely to protect them.
Living fences don’t have to be a thing of the past, though. In modern landscape design, there are plenty of reasons to consider a hedgerow of your own. Depending on the plants you choose, a living fence can serve a variety of purposes, says Steven Biggs, a Toronto-based horticulturist, author and host of the podcast “Food Garden Life.” “A hedge can create a boundary on a property, or a privacy fence. It can act as a windbreak, or provide shade, or wildlife habitat.”
In hotter climates across Africa and the Caribbean, it’s common to see walls, both functional and decorative, made of cactuses. In the United States, colonial homesteaders often created hedges with Osage orange, a hardy native tree with a tangle of branches and spiky thorns.
“I’ve seen some just really amazing pictures where people planted Osage orange in a hedge, and it gets so tangled and hard, you could actually walk on top of it,” says Kip McConnell, director at Plant Development Services Inc., an Alabama-based plant breeding company. “It’s such a tough plant. It’s got these really long, green thorns on it, so it was very much a barrier.”
In fact, Osage orange made such an effective fence, some suggest it was the inspiration for the late-1800s invention of barbed wire, which quickly replaced the trees on farms across the country.
Unlike most vinyl, wood or metal fences, a hedge can serve multiple purposes at once. And aesthetically speaking, it can be a lot more interesting than flat slats. You can incorporate flowering trees, shrubs with foliage that changes color throughout the year or plants with fragrant blooms, McConnell says.
“It’s easy to picture just a basic evergreen hedge,” he says. “But there are lots of evergreens that bloom. We have some camellias in our collection that are amazing. They’re evergreen but they have flowers with great color beginning in early fall. Some hollies have beautifully colorful, variegated foliage. We also recommend gardenias, which give you a great fragrant bloom in the summertime and are a nice evergreen shrub the rest of the year. Those all make a nice mid- to lower-height hedge.”
The other benefit to hedging with evergreens, McConnell adds, is how little work they require once they’re planted. “You may not want something where you’re going to have to do constant pruning,” he says. “Evergreens tend to be useful plants that are pretty easy to maintain.”
A boon for backyard wildlife
In addition to its aesthetic value, a living fence can make a big difference in the wider ecology of your yard. It provides wildlife with a much-needed place to hide, nest, hunt and forage, which means installing one could promote biodiversity.
“The birds need those areas where they can get in and feed and hide from predators,” McConnell says. A dense hedgerow offers safe nesting habitat for birds and small mammals, not to mention the pollinators and beneficial insects they feed on. “This is one of those benefits that you don’t get when you just put up a regular fence.”
When you branch out from evergreens, Biggs says, a living fence can have even more advantages. Many food-producing plants lend themselves nicely to hedging, he says, and the fruits and nuts they yield can feed animals and humans alike.
“Some more well-known things — like hazelnuts, raspberries, elderberries, grapevines, crab apples and pecans — weave together really well into an edible hedge,” Biggs says. “But some more common landscape plants people might already have are edible, too. Roses, for instance, have edible petals, and the rosehips can be used to make tea or jelly.” Other common hedge shrubs, including juniper and barberry, he adds, have edible berries.
Even blueberries can be a great fencing choice. “Some of the older blueberry varieties could get big and rangy,” McConnell says, “but there’s some new varieties that stay very compact and neat and have ornamental foliage in addition to great-tasting fruit.”
If you’re looking for a lower-to-the-ground option, McConnell also recommends considering an herbal hedge. English lavender is a perennial that keeps its fragrant foliage year-round in many growing zones and flowers each spring. Or try rosemary. “It grows into a quintessential small hedge, and even just brushing against it fills the whole garden with fragrance,” he says.
There aren’t a lot of rules for living fences, especially when you’re using edible plants.
“In a home garden setting, I love an edible hedge that has different things ready at different times,” Biggs says. “In my own backyard, I have my row of currant and gooseberry bushes, and I kept looking at it and thinking, ‘I’d like to punctuate that with plum trees.’ And then I thought, ‘How about some strawberries at the base?’ You can come at it with the idea of grazing along the hedge a little bit this week, a little next week, for most of the year.”
A structure with staying power
If you’re ready to plant a living fence, a landscape professional or someone at your local nursery can help you choose the best plants for your yard and desired effect. Consider whether you want something that grows tall and thick, a waist-height hedge or something in between, and whether things like fruit, fragrance or color are priorities. It can also be helpful to start with more than one plant variety, Biggs says.
“You should always have an expectation that some things will do better than others over time,” he says. “If you plant 10 different things, it’s fair to assume that’ll whittle down in a few years as some things die out; then you can stick with what’s doing best.”
One of the few drawbacks to a living fence is that it almost certainly won’t go up in a day — or even in a year. “It’s tough to get instant gratification with a project like this,” McConnell says. “I mean, if you have lots of money, maybe you can go out and purchase things that are already full-grown, but more than likely, you’re going to have to wait on it to grow.”
But once a hedge is established, it can last generations. In Cambridgeshire, England, a row of interlaced hawthorn called Judith’s Hedge is widely considered the oldest in the country, having marked a parish boundary there since the 11th century. It would be tough for a homeowner to find a modern fencing material that could last 900 years, McConnell says.
“Watching it grow is part of the joy,” he adds. “You get a lot of satisfaction from watching these plants start out small and come to maturity as a strong fence that could live a very long time.”
Kate Morgan is a freelance writer in Richland, Pa.
