I'm so sad - our neighbours have cut down all the trees at the bottom of our garden

[tortoiseshell]

What can we grow to replace them? THere was a wonderful screen of conifers, which aren't the most interesting of trees, but our garden was so secluded, and today without telling us they were going to, they chopped the whole lot down so our garden is totally overlooked by their horrible house now. I cried, I was so sad! It's ruined our garden for the moment.

What is a good screening plant?

People are horrible aren't they? Presuming you're not actively hostile with each other, why couldn't they have approached you to discuss it? Boo to mean tree hating people.

Definitely! They could just have told us what was going to happen. INteresting that you said 'tree hating' people - dh and I have for ages divided the world into tree hating and tree loving people - my parents and his mum are very much tree haters, and cut them down as much as possible , we are tree lovers and plant them whenever we can!

We have, admittedly rather overgrown, conifers at the end of our front garden, and we've had so many comments from people along the lines of "so when are you going to cut them down then?" We love them as they give us lots of privacy - must tidy up the overhanging bits though, then hopefully the comments will stop!

Have just spoken to the gardener doing the garden design (had to climb on the climbing frame.... First thing he said was that ds1 had told him (from his vantage point on the climbing frame) that he was horrid for cutting down the trees, and he had liked them, and he wanted them back! That's my boy!

But more importantly, he said he had persuaded them to plant 3 or 4 semimature trees, which should be nicer than leylandii anyway, so I am happy. And we are going to put at least one tree, and maybe some native hedging in, so it should actually end up nicer than it was. Yay!!!!

Sounds good. Be grateful for that gardener!

I so am Bozza! Have been looking at nice trees today, thinking what I could put in!

May be a bit late with this reply, but our mixed native hedge has hawthorn, hazel, wayfaring tree, field maple, elder, dog rose and a bit of holly (wish it had blackthorn but the nursery were out). A traditional way of growing a hedge is to keep most of it shortish (you would still get the height you want) and thick, but allow one plant every now and then to grow into a tree to form a canopy layer which will encourage wildlife. If you wanted to go for native specimen trees then silver birch or crab apple would be good, and you could include crab apple in your hedge. We already have an established mn hedge to our front boundary and this year we had blackbirds, robins, wrens, bluetits and greenfinches all nesting in it.

We planted our hedge in the late winter and it has doubled in size. In our last house a bank was covered in mn hedge in six yrs.

nearlythree, that sounds just the sort of thing we're thinking about. What sort of thickness of hedge do you have? A crab apple would be lovely! Not too late a reply at all!

PS, spent ages working out what a Mumsnet hedge was (mn hedge) then realised that obviously you meant mixed native. I spend too much time on here.

It's not all that thick at the moment, but we have a double row and it is about 2 ft apart. A specialist tree/hedging nursery is the best place to go, at first it looks as though you've planted a load of twigs but they get away so quickly!

lol at the mn hedge btw ,I am just too lazy to keep typing!