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Gardening

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Evergreen shrub help please!

6 replies

Belgrano · 09/11/2011 14:38

I know v v little about gardening and have inherited a decent sized garden (c.60x60 feet) with almost nothing in it, flower wise. It's all grass.

There's a panel fence down the LH side which is shaded overhead by next door's huuuuge bushes and the ground is fairly boggy. The fence faces East (the whole garden is North facing although the garden gets a fair bit of sun as there isn't much else around shading it and our house is not tall). This particular area gets the least sun though - a few hours in the morning and a little bit again in the evening in the summer.

I need some evergreen shrubs because the fence has huge thick scary screws protruding out of it a couple of inches. I want to create a wide bed next to the fence before someone runs into the child's-eye-height screws. So I need dense evergreen shrubs at least 70 cm tall to cover these scary screws all year. I'd like some flowers somewhere but can put those in front of the dense evergreens I suppose. Ideally I would like a few different ones as it is about 7m long so space for some variety.

So far I have identified Euonymous fortunei (Emerald Gaiety) which is evergreen, looks nice and seems to like those conditions, but absolutely nothing else. I think it might be a bit boring to fill the whole length with that - or am I wrong? See, I know very little....

Any ideas please oh knowledgeable MNers?
Thank you.

OP posts:
discrete · 09/11/2011 19:53

Could you not get rid of the screws? I'd start with that tbh.

Maybe rhododendrons might do OK in that situation?

Another possibility would be to cover the fence in ivy and put a wideish bed in front of it (maybe a slightly raised one to help with the boggy conditions) where you can put some nice shade-loving stuff.

glitterkitty · 09/11/2011 20:05

Choisya. Mexican orange blossom. Grows in shade, evergreen, has lovely white flowers. Variety called Aztec Pearl has pinky flowers with lovely smell. have a google!.

glitterkitty · 09/11/2011 20:06

pics here

Belgrano · 11/11/2011 09:31

Oooh I love that! How pretty. I will definitely be using that thank you Glitterkitty.
Discrete - thanks but removing the screws is not an option, they sort of hold up the fence and thus next door's hedges and since we have no cash I don't want to get into replacing fences. They go through the fence on the neighbour's side and through huge concrete posts on our side, and it is from those posts that they stick out. I have (had someone in with power tools who) saw-ed off as much as possible but it leaves a good 3 inches of stickyout part.
I will look into rhododendron but I thought it was poisonous or am i imagining it? DS is a baby and we have a puppy too who likes to chomp and explore. I have always been biased against it for being poisonous but I might be stigmatising an innocent plant!

OP posts:
discrete · 11/11/2011 18:28

AFAIK rhodedendron is not poisonous to humans, but they are to dogs. Pretty, though.

clairefromsteps · 11/11/2011 21:01

Spotted laurels are also a nice evergreen. They grow fairly quickly, shade tolerant and are happy in any soil type AFAIK. You can also get a euonymus called emerald and gold - also does fine in shade.

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