The flowering hedge plants that best suit your needs
The seedlings for low hedges are used to form a plant structure suitable for gardens that need to cover their privacy but at the same time do not “close” the view and garden.
Composed of multiple varieties of plants, the hedge can still have different shapes and heights depending on the needs . The hedge can be high, medium or low. The first is characterized by shrub plants that can even reach a height of two meters, the second can be formed by plants of one and a half meters in height, and the last by plants that reach half a meter.
The medium hedge is generally used to allow you to see beyond the border along which it is placed and its height also allows it to be crossed. The tallest hedge is used for delimiting driveways, parking lots or play areas and also to prevent pets from going further. On the other hand, the low hedge has none of these functions and is used simply to decorate or delimit an area used for particular uses .
A low, high or medium height hedge is characterized by several plants arranged one next to the other in very narrow rows, so as to create a compact and dense natural wall of bushy trees and shrubs. Hedges can be simple ornamental motifs, as often happens in our Italian gardens; or they can have the function of delimiting or defending a property, to protect a particular area of the garden that you do not want to be reached by light or wind. When you create a hedge in your garden, the choice of plants to use depends on what will be the function of the same.
For a hedge that wants to act as a windbreak, it is better to choose conifers, which are tall and evergreen with a thick and compact crown. If you need a defensive hedge, medium-height, tangled and thorny bushy shrubs are suitable.
If your intent is to make the garden more pleasant then flowering plants, fragrant and decorative for a low hedge.
The low hedge and its functionality
To create a low hedge, you can choose different varieties of plants, evergreen or flowering.
If you choose an evergreen low hedge you will have greenery in the garden all year round. The flowery one, on the other hand, guarantees you a good ornamental yield both in spring and in summer, but during the winter it will become bare. This happens if the low flowering hedges are composed of deciduous flowering species. To avoid this inconvenience, it is possible to create a low evergreen hedge that is flowering at the same time, therefore composed of evergreen plants that bloom during spring and summer .
Among the plants most used to create a low evergreen hedge we have boxwood, berberis, mahonia . The flowery one can be characterized with santolina, spirea, rose, potentilla, escallonia, caryopteris and lavender . These are all shrub plants that bloom from May to October and can also be placed in the same hedge to give a colorful effect during flowering and to have a colorful and rich low hedge at different times of the year.
Once you’ve figured out which plants are best suited to your purpose, and decided what type of hedge to build in your garden, it’s important to prepare the soil .
First you dig a hole for each plant, at a distance that varies according to the size of the plants you have chosen and work the soil a little, putting organic fertilizer and peat to make it more fertile and facilitate drainage. Before digging the hole it is better to remember that the hedges must keep a certain distance from the border as required by the law, for low hedges it is 50 cm away.
When your plants are settled, surely the most important interventions for the maintenance of the hedge will be pruning, facilitated with specific hedge shears, and irrigation or fertilization that change according to the plant species you have chosen. This type of plant arrangement fears stagnation of water so it is good to water when the soil is dry and at the end of winter, to help its recovery and also paying close attention to the fertilization period which varies depending on the type of plant.
