Screening a fence line without waiting ten years

On a lot in Empire Ranch, Folsom Ranch, or any of the newer subdivisions around the city, the houses sit close and the windows look across. A back yard can be beautifully built and still go unused because it feels like a stage.

Raising the fence is the obvious answer and usually the wrong one: it is limited by what the association and the city permit, it makes the yard feel smaller, and a taller flat plane is more oppressive rather than less.

Plant in front of the fence, not above it

A layer of planting along the fence line does what an extra two feet of board never does. It breaks the line, adds depth, softens the sound, and reads as a garden edge rather than a boundary.

The plants that work here have to be evergreen, since a screen that drops its leaves in November stops screening in the season when the low sun makes every window visible, and they have to hold up through four rainless months.

• Pacific wax myrtle. The regional workhorse. Fast, dense, evergreen, and it takes shearing if a formal edge is wanted.
• Toyon. Native, tough, red berries in winter, and content in sun or part shade.
• Coffeeberry. Slower, unfussy, and the best of these in dry shade where a neighbour’s tree already shades the fence.
• Clumping bamboo, in a root barrier. The fastest screen available and the only one on this list that will ruin your life if the barrier is skipped or the species is a running type.
• Upright rosemary. Not tall, but excellent at the base of a taller layer and mostly left alone by deer.

Spacing, and the two years you have to accept

The temptation is to plant at instant-effect spacing, close enough to look solid on handover day. Four years later that planting is a single overgrown mass that needs cutting back hard, at which point it stops screening anything for a season.

Plant at mature spacing and accept two seasons of gaps. Fill the gaps with something temporary if the exposure is uncomfortable. The screen that arrives in year three and stays right for twenty is a better trade than one that looks finished in month one.

A fire note for the eastern edge

On lots backing onto open ground, toward El Dorado Hills and Cameron Park, a continuous evergreen hedge along a boundary fence is exactly the continuous fuel run that defensible space planning is designed to break up. Grouped masses with gaps between them screen just as well and behave better. The fire-wise guide covers how that changes a planting plan.

The other half of enclosure

Screening handles the sides. What makes a yard feel like a room is something overhead, which is where a pergola, a canopy tree, or a shade sail does work no amount of planting at eye level can. The shade guide covers the options and what each one costs.