It always surprises me when I go into the bathroom after giving a dinner party and find the shade pulled down. Who is possibly going to look in the window? I guess city folk just make it a habit. Since we live on the hilltop where Locust Hill Road ends, we never pull shades except to conserve heat on cold winter nights.
Hedges are like shades. A good thick hedge can protect you from your neighbor's peeking eyes and gossiping tongue or her husband's obnoxious dog. It can block off the view of their lime-green bungalow with pink shutters or their back yard where he rebuilds junk cars and she hangs out long underwear and flapping sheets.
A privet hedge, once very popular, has gone the way of rubber plants on the windowsill, but it was once the height of fashion. We have friends with a house in Buffalo Bay, a summer colony on the Connecticut shore, where the privet hedges are 10 feet high. Clipped by a community gardener three times a summer, these tidy green screens hide clotheslines, garbage cans and naked swimmers taking outdoor showers.
If kept free of saplings and other stray vegetation, a privet hedge enhances the summer house, losing its leaves only as the occupants close their houses for the winter. Unlike evergreen hedges, privet can be severely pruned, so if you've inherited one that's been neglected or grown too tall, you can cut it down to size without killing it.
A more interesting deciduous shrub that makes a nice summer hedge is Euonymus alatus, known as burning bush because each fall its leaves turn a brilliant flaming red. Unfortunately the sheared hedge pictured above hadn't started to put on the bright autumn colors so I added a sample from a bush in our yard. The dwarf variety Compactus remains small and needs hardly any clipping compared to the privet.
Evergreen hedges make more sense
for the year-round house. They can screen
an undesirable view, provide an excellent
windbreak and require far less maintenance
than a privet. If you're not pinching pennies,
nursery-grown stock makes the best plant-
ing material. Yews are more often used as
foundation planting and require constant
clipping to look well. Hemlocks and arbor-
vitae make the best hedges. They grow Yew Hedge
very slowly and only need clipping once or
twice a summer. Provided their sides are gently sloped so that the lower branches get plenty of sun and rain, they will look well for years.
If I hadn't already become the penny-pincher of Low Cost Hill back when we first moved here, I would have bought a dozen arborvitae like those in this column's top picture to form a windbreak on the north side of the house. Instead we decided to plant a hedge of white pine. We dug up a dozen foot-high seedlings growing in the meadow and spaced them three feet apart. There were hemlock seedlings in the woods we could have taken, but wild hemlocks are spindly, a different species than the Canadian hemlock sold by nurseries, and need shade to do well.
Canadian Hemlock Hedge
White pines are easy to transplant when young as their lateral roots spread very little and their tap roots are only moderately deep. The hedge isn't sheared the way other evergreen hedges are. To thicken it one must pinch off the central shoot of each cluster of new growth in early spring. This confuses the four remaining shoots and they all fight to become the new leader, creating short bushy branches. Using this pruning method, a white pine hedge becomes very thick in only a few years.
Compared to a hedge that is clipped, our hedge looked a bit shaggy like a row of fat furry green bears, but it provided an excellent windbreak. It's long gone, however, as we had to cut it down when we re-landscaped that area of the yard. I couldn't find a white pine hedge anywhere in the northwest corner for a photo, so you'll just have to use your imagination to picture it.
Flowering shrubs can be planted as a hedge, but are rarely thick enough to provide protection from wind or prying eyes, and most of them are deciduous, losing their leaves each fall. The hedge of maple trees in the photo below is in front of a house on Route #272 north of Norfolk. For years the owner clipped them religiously so they grew very dense, but when I went over there to take a photo I saw that they'd grown so tall no one could trim them any more. They must be quite beautiful when their leaves begin to turn.
