LANDSCAPING FOR PRIVACY: HEDGES, FENCES, ARBORS--SUNSET

Many people will look around their property and find parts of it that they do not fully utilize for the reason that there is no privacy. Even if they use an area, perhaps they have a desire to use it for something else, but again, they have never followed through and built that pool because of the lack of decent privacy.

This Sunset book is written to address this fact, and help you come up with ideas to add privacy through landscaping.

Like many Sunset series books, this book provides us with no information about the authors. Thus, we are unable to judge whether or not they carry any special qualifications to present such a book. In such a case we must judge the book on its contents only, but I have to say that I have had very good luck with Sunset books in general, and this one was satisfying too.

It has been my experience that books that talk about landscaping tend to have a leaning. They either lean toward illustrating ideas for how to landscape, giving you lots of pictures and filling you with inspiration, or they lean toward the practical, giving tables and charts of what plants do well where, zone hardiness, growth expectations, what works well in planters, etcetera. This book is fifty-fifty, I can report.

All of the photographs and most of the yard plans in this book are full color. There are, on average, approximately three large color photographs of landscaping options to every two page spread. This was definitely enough illustration for my wife and I to sit together and think and talk about what we liked and what we didn’t. Any more and it would surely have cut into the practical information that the book provides, and personally, pictures and inspiration are fairly undesirable unless the practicalities of the project are at least somewhat laid out alongside.

The book is laid out according to a fairly loose logic. Some chapters deal with specific areas of the outdoor space, such as street frontage, back yard. Other chapters deal with specific types of landscaping materials, such a walls, hedges or vines. If I had one criticism of this book it would be that it is really quite hard to pinpoint information you might be looking for on a particular problem. An example of this is hedging. There are appreciable, useful and quite large sections on the use of hedges in at least three places in the book. Now, there is an index, and as indexes go it is an excellent one, but the point I am making is that the information could have been more logically grouped in my opinion.

The reference material that is provided in this book is of an excellent quality. I find that the information is consistently as follows: tells you what to use, how well it performs under a variety of conditions, what kind of screening you can expect from it, and any complications or considerations (such as weight bearing abilities of trellises, type of soil required etc.)

I would definitely take time to say that the sections on structural screens such as fences and porches and gazebos on no occasion provide enough information to get the project done. Oddly, they do go to the length of illustrating the basic plan for a fence, showing how it gets put together, but god forbid this should be the only information you used in your landscaping fence construction project! Somewhat akin to building a hang glider and launching off without any lessons on how to use it.

It is perhaps at this point that it would be beneficial to the thoroughness of this review to give you a listing of the main chapter headings for this book:

Outdoor Living Spaces
Between you and the Street
Versatile Back Yards
Problem Areas
Shrubs and Hedges
Landscaping with Trees
Vines and Climbers
Fences and Screens
Masonry Walls
Garden Structures
Enhancements

I have found great little pearls in nearly every section of the book. I had for example never thought of constructing a simple frame of wood to permit my honeysuckle to act as a hedge. Nor had it ever crossed my mind to enclose our hot tub with container shrubs to give it privacy from the house side. Just little pearls, like I said, but this book is full of them.

This book will help you find inspiration, is beautiful enough for you and those with whom you share your living space to sit down together and chat over, and has a large amount of practical information. A little gem.