Hedges - Fake Landscapes

hedges

outdoor: UV and weather resistant

Hedges, along with living walls, make up a significant part of our outdoor work.

There are all sorts of reasons for having them – decorative, for privacy, protection from the wind and so on. In London it’s frequently to lose a naff view and/or a naff neighbour!

What matters most is that they have texture, tonal variation and appear three-dimensional. Otherwise you might just as well paint some plywood dark green. They also have to ‘work’ close-up when you’re sitting next to them, as well as when you see the building from a distance. They’re harder to get right than it might seem, which is why there are so many awful ones out there…

Also, as they’re out there in the elements, they need to last years without detectable change. That means over-engineering the base structure, using brass and aluminium for the unseen fixings, lots of weighting - and all sorts of other stuff you’ll never notice - but that matter.

As always, have a look at the pictures, the individual captions have a lot more information, plus some of the usual low wit…

hedges

outdoor:

UV and weather resistant

600 fake landscapes 20m x 65cm buxus hedge SW1

600

Just showing off, somewhere in the land of Stucco™! The buxus hedge is well over 20 metres long overall, and the visible part (there are planters behind the balustrade) comes 65cm above the parapet. The ‘in-and-out’ of the building works nicely, and the late sun shows the ‘slightly grown-out’ look of the hedges really well. 600

601

These are much larger then they look, because we don’t have an elf in there for scale. The planters are around 80cm tall, and the bay hedge is a good metre above that, so they’re sort of person height. They show the idea of a series of hedges being much more 3D than a continuous run nicely. 601

602 fake landscapes 35cm in-ground boxwood hedge 1080 (2)

602

A neat in-ground hedge 35cm high, fun to do mainly because we didn’t have to dig the trench round the roots of the existing trees ourselves (thanks, Clive)! These low hedges are handy to define the edges of a town garden. We’re doing more and more of them as the real thing tends not to last, they get bad patches and become woody. Not Woody, who’s one of a number of different entities. 602

603 fake landscapes CZ W11 500mm shaggy buxus run

603

This is one of those hedges designed to lose the boring bit of the street immediately below the window, but retain the long view. The planters are 40cm high and the hedge much the same, and we made it extra-shaggy on the inward facing bit so you can still see the texture when the windows are closed. 603

604 Fake Landscapes low unstructured boxwood hedges W8

604

Also 30-odd cm high, a bit like the in-ground hedge earlier, but in the clients existing planters where they’d struggled with live boxwood. It’s not our area of expertise - but most of the live plants we take out of small containers tend to be either waterlogged or bone-dry, so there must be a minimum volume of earth needed to maintain balance. Not any more =) 604

606 fake landscapes100cm UV box hedge run one hyde park

606

Tall and narrow planters to maximise outdoor space on a balcony at One Hyde Park, these are actually only 18cm deep. The hedge/planter combination comes to 90cm tall, and the client wanted much more green than container, so there’s a lot of weight in those bases! 606

607

Another narrow planter, this time with a bay hedge and fixed from behind the railings so the leaves appear to be growing through. We did some nice matching window boxes here as well, but the picture is taken from too low down to show them so you’ll have to use your imagination… 607

608 fake landscapes boxwood screening hedge for railings 180cm

608

Here’s another ‘from behind’ (© Not The Nine O’Clock News) hedge, this time in boxwood and around 2m tall for (a lot of) privacy. Because it’s on the roof, this is fixed - invisibly - in more ways than can be imagined to prevent the wind causing trouble. 608

609 fake landscapes low inset hedge with balls and lavender

609

Another of the ‘in-ground’ hedges, but this time as a rectangle in a raised planter, with some topiary balls and our dark lavender in the middle as well. We spend a lot of time getting the various tones of green right in our UV boxwood – it’s now in its eighth or ninth generation - and you can see how well it blends in with the live stuff behind. 609

610

Yes, more boring cubist stuff, but with a difference - these are to conceal air-conditioning units and are built open-backed on a steel mesh. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that it’s not the same leaf type as the others. It’s actually made with a flatter and even tougher variant so that it can be pressure-washed regularly to remove the dust the a/c units blow through. 610

612 fake landscapes 1KG envelope buxus on balcony

612

Last but not least, here are a set of classic hedges designed to line up with the doors and windows of an apartment. They let light through but you don’t have to trouser-up as you move around inside. Allegedly! 612

613

Here’s one of those weird and wonderful things we get asked to do from time to time. The idea was to discourage people from vaulting the barriers to get to the buses. We thought the 3D logo worked nicely, but in the end there wasn’t the budget. Which is hard to argue with, judging by the journey-to-work stories here most days! 613