Screening Plants – hiding a garden eyesore

My garden, with its three sheds (one of which looks like a nuclear bunker), has its fair share of eyesores which need to be screened by plants. But perhaps the most challenging of these is the cricket net which my husband built for our cricket-mad sons. What screening plants could possibly hide it?

The net isn’t discretely tucked away in the corner of the garden. No, it sits loud and proud, slap-bang in the middle of the garden, jutting out into the space.

When we first began erecting it, our long suffering neighbours thought that we were possibly putting up a large fruit cage. They very expertly grow a lot of their own fruit and veg and perhaps thought they’d converted us. How wrong they were. At 15 metres long, 3 metres wide and high, the net is rather bigger than any fruit cage – and, as the years of relentless noise have proven, it’s very much a homage to batting not blackberries!!

Anyway, when redesigning our garden a key challenge was to find screening plants to hide the net, which can’t have anything growing over it.

Plants for screening – ideas

I decided that I needed a line of smallish trees. Trees which wouldn’t cast too much shadow on the rest of the garden, wouldn’t get too big, would create a statement feature and look a bit different. I explored all sorts of options but decided to go for the Catalpa Bignonioides Nana, or Indian Bean Tree Nana – which isn’t from India and doesn’t produce beans!

Catalpa Bignonioides Nana

It has the same leaves and flowering habit as the standard species (Catalpa Bignonioides) but Nana is much more compact, with a gorgeous mophead of large, heart-shaped leaves above a slim 2 metre trunk free of branches. These leaves emerge in late spring and stay an attractive, slightly limey mid-green until the autumn, when they turn yellow. The tree offers lots of potential interest beyond this. It can produce lovely dappled white flowers in summer which can be followed by decorative hanging seed pods in the autumn.  Importantly Catalpa Bignonioides Nana will only reach a full height of 4 metres and spread of 3 metres – so it’s ideal for screening the cricket net.

Screen with an arching design

I love an ‘arc’ shape, and the way I’ve planted the trees (yes I dug the holes for the trees myself) reflects that. I have five of the Nanas forming a graceful curve. With their slender trunks I thought they could look a bit spindly, so to ‘plump up’ the look a little, and to further hide the dreaded net, I’ve planted two annabelle hydrangeas at the base of each tree. (Yes that’s 10 holes for hydrangeas too). I’ve also placed three box (Buxus) balls at the base of the central tree; the rounded shape of the Buxus echoes the mopheads of both the hydrangeas and the trees.

The end result is that the eye is easily distracted from the cricket net. It’s most definitely there, but the statement trees give you something else to focus on – and when the trees are in full leaf and the hydrangeas are doing their thing the result is (I think) stunning. What’s more, if the cricket net is eventually removed, the trees will still look like they belong, providing a natural divide between the front and rear portion of my back garden.

What Next?

For now, however, as with all things in my garden, this area is definitely a work in progress. We have issues mowing around the box balls, so much so that one of them has been slightly sliced and isn’t a lovely perfect ball shape anymore. So I’ll need to replace it and improve Mr F-W’s lawnmower technique.

I also feel the bases of the trees in late winter and early spring, before the hydrangeas get going, can look rather bare. So I plan to plant a bold swathe of bulbs – in an arc (of course!) – to overcome this. I haven’t worked out what combination of bulbs to go for yet. That’s going to involve some serious researching and planning, over countless cups of coffee at the garden centre (my idea of bliss). So it’s for another day – and another blog.