How do I hide an unsightly area in my garden?
Never loose heart if your garden is marred by a clutter of dustbins, children’s toys, or even a view of your neighbour’s caravan; with our garden screening ideas you can a problem into an asset using design tricks and carefully chosen plants.
Garden screening ideas – dustbins
Let’s start with an eyesore that nearly everyone has to cope with – the ubiquitous dustbins. It may be a satisfying DYI project to build a dustbin compound (my husband certainly thought so) but because of the construction’s solid and, frankly, obvious outline the construction rarely achieves its intention. A screen of textured evergreen plants of various heights is a better solution to deter the eye from straying behind. If your dustbins are on a hard surface, consider planting up a wide trough with yews or beech to create a screening hedge. Oil tanks can be hidden in much the same way, or by using a decorative trellis covered with climbers, such as a lovely, scented climbing rose.
The winter flowering Clematis cirrhosa var. purpurascens ‘Freckles’ is a wonderful, evergreen screening plant with the bonus of scented delicate flowers appearing as early as January. For spring interest, the vigorous, evergreen Clematis armandii will quickly grow to do the job.
Garden shed screening ideas
With a thoughtful approach, even the humblest shed can become a feature—not a flaw—in your garden. Rather than treating the shed as an afterthought, integrate it into your garden’s aesthetic. Add planters, hanging baskets, or a green roof if the structure allows. Sometimes, simply painting the shed in a softer tone or adding horizontal cladding can visually ‘recede’ it into the garden. Natural greens, greys, or muted earth tones work best. Plants offer a versatile and attractive way to screen sheds, and can suit both traditional cottage gardens and contemporary outdoor spaces.
Climbing plants are a natural fit. Fast growers like Clematis montana, honeysuckle, and climbing roses can quickly clothe a shed wall. Evergreen options like Trachelospermum jasminoides (star jasmine) offer year-round coverage and delicious scent in summer. Use trellis or tension wires on the shed itself or nearby posts to support growth while allowing airflow. Planting a hedge along one side of the shed can create a structured screen, hawthorn, hornbeam, or laurel will quickly grow into substantial hedges. For smaller gardens, try upright forms such as Photinia ‘Red Robin’ or Portuguese laurel trained as a narrow hedge. For other ideas on sheds and garden rooms visit our page here.
How to disguise a shed in a garden?
Disguise need not always be a low key operation. I’m all in favour of taking a brazenly positive approach to the garden shed, which can become almost anything you want with a little imagination, plywood and paint. A store for children’s clobber, painted in bright candy colours with wavy eaves and window boxes attached becomes a gingerbread cottage. Pointed arches over window and door with a turret roof makes a gothic lodge. A Chinese look can be created with a pagoda style gable and coat of bright red paint. Decorate the side of the shed with split larch poles and grow dwarf pines around for a woodland cabin…and so on.
How to disguise a garden manhole cover?
When it comes to inspection chambers, on the other hand, restraint is definitely required. Hardly a thing of beauty, yet we have to live with them, a common solution is to place a container over the cover, thus making it a feature in itself. In what other circumstance would a gardener place a pot of plants in the middle of a lawn? A better disguise is to turn the surrounding area into a hard surface of paving or gravel, then the pots or trailing plants are more easily incorporated. When the cover isn’t far from the edge of the lawn, extend the flower bed to incorporate the offending object and plant ground cover over the top. If it becomes necessary to open it, cut back the plants, they will soon recover.
In this example an attractive hedge has been planted around to screen the manhole cover. From a distance you wouldn’t know it was there!
If disguise is not an option, we often use recessed manhole covers, which set the cover into paving slabs.
How to screen a garden from neighbours?
A common problem in many of the Gloucestershire new build gardens we see is being overlooked by neighbours. In the example above, the photos, of the same garden were taken just one year apart. So don’t loose heart if you have the same issue! It is possible to screen from neighbours quite quickly by judicious planting.
Before you start installing screens or planting hedges to cut off your neighbours, it’s important to establish your legal boundaries and understand local planning rules. Fences or walls must not exceed 2 metres in height (or 1 metre next to a highway) without planning permission and trees and hedges planted near boundaries should be maintained to prevent overhang or excessive height that might cause light loss.
Garden screening ideas – hedges
Hedges are a classic and environmentally friendly way to create privacy. Choose evergreen varieties such as laurel, or yew for year-round cover and where space is limited pleached hedges make an excellent solution.
In the above example a neighbouring window had a perfect view into the area the family wanted to sit and relax. Our solution was to plant a screen of pleached Holme Oak trees, not directly on the boundary, but inside the garden a few metres from the neighbours. This is an important point – it’s often good to keep relationships between neighbours harmonious and planting tall trees on a boundary can feel a little invasive! Nothing here for neighbours to object but the trees are doing a good job of providing the family’s privacy. The Holme oak (Quercus ilex) makes a ready made garden screening ideas. They are expensive to buy but will make an almost instant screen. Other options include pleached hawthorn, laurel or photinia.
Using grasses as screening
Ornamental grasses such as Miscanthus or Calamagrostis provide movement and texture while offering seasonal screening. Clumping bamboos (e.g. Fargesia) can be excellent for quick screening without the invasiveness of running types. Check before buying because bamboo can be very invasive. If in doubt, they are easy to grow in containers or we use root barriers for control. As in the example below the container or trough must be fairly large to allow the plants to grow successfully but there is no doubt that for contemporary garden screening ideas bamboo can be a good choice. 
With a little imagination it is quite possible to improve the most unpromising of outlooks, concealing its bad points, enhancing its virtues and increasing your pleasure in the garden.
