Hi everybody.
Complete beginner gardener here.
My boyfriend and I are buying a house, with a garden that's very open to the outside world and not simple to make more private. It's right at the foot of a slope, down from a street, so a fence wouldn't work, because it would have to be impossibly tall for people not to be able to look straight over it. At the same time the garden is very wet, because of soil that doesn't drain particularly well and high ground water, so generally hedge plants will not happily grow there as far as I can understand. So I was looking into other options and am now wondering if we could solve the problem with a row of pollarded willow trees? If we plant little willow trees and wait for them to reach the desired height (they'd still be very young), would it be possible to keep them permanently at 3-3,5 meters (10-12 feet) by pollarding? So they would block the view to the street, keeping the crowns at eye height from people passing by, and not get tall enough to shade the entire, pretty small, garden.
I realize the trees wouldn't have crowns for a part of the year, but that would be in the winter, so not when we'd be wanting to have dinner in the garden or lie around in bathing suits anyway.
If not pollarded trees, do you have another idea for how to close off the garden instead? The slope down from the street is 1-1.5 meters (4-5 feet) high. The plants would have to be at the foot of the slope, because that's where the garden starts. The slope itself is public, not ours. Since the garden is small it shouldn't be something too wide.
We're in Denmark, so the climate is mild. It doesn't get very cold or very hot.
Thank you.
Complete beginner gardener here.
My boyfriend and I are buying a house, with a garden that's very open to the outside world and not simple to make more private. It's right at the foot of a slope, down from a street, so a fence wouldn't work, because it would have to be impossibly tall for people not to be able to look straight over it. At the same time the garden is very wet, because of soil that doesn't drain particularly well and high ground water, so generally hedge plants will not happily grow there as far as I can understand. So I was looking into other options and am now wondering if we could solve the problem with a row of pollarded willow trees? If we plant little willow trees and wait for them to reach the desired height (they'd still be very young), would it be possible to keep them permanently at 3-3,5 meters (10-12 feet) by pollarding? So they would block the view to the street, keeping the crowns at eye height from people passing by, and not get tall enough to shade the entire, pretty small, garden.
I realize the trees wouldn't have crowns for a part of the year, but that would be in the winter, so not when we'd be wanting to have dinner in the garden or lie around in bathing suits anyway.
If not pollarded trees, do you have another idea for how to close off the garden instead? The slope down from the street is 1-1.5 meters (4-5 feet) high. The plants would have to be at the foot of the slope, because that's where the garden starts. The slope itself is public, not ours. Since the garden is small it shouldn't be something too wide.
We're in Denmark, so the climate is mild. It doesn't get very cold or very hot.
Thank you.