Suitable Hedge to grow for screening road noise.

[mumof3teens]

Hi
We are in the process of deciding whether to buy a house with a 1.3 acre garden. The back garden gets a fair bit of road noise from an A road not too far away (although the majority of the garden is at the front of the property and the road noise is much less). The road is set down probably 20 ft below the garden. We had a quote for acoustic fencing which would apparently lower the road noise by 19 decibels (?). There are lots of trees on the boundary, but most are still leaf free. We would like to plant fairly fast growing evergreen hedging. We thought maybe Holly, Privet etc. Does anyone have any experience of noise-reducing trees/shrubs/bushes etc please?

"Fast growing...evergreen" = conifers? I hate to say that as I loathe them with a vengeance but if you can keep them under control, they would help with the noise.

conifers woudl be teh fastetst growing. apparently they do make a good hedge if you keep them under control. you need to trim them on teh sides and teh top regularly. only certain types are suitable for hedging

Thanks for the replies. Yes, we were really trying to steer away from Conifers (partic Leylandii), but they may prove to be the best option.

to reduce noise I think you need a quite deep baffling hedge/mini-copse, not a single 'wall' of hedging. I think Bob Flowerdew did something on this? Maybe 2-3 trees deep?

Laurel, photinia, berberis, holly, I would chuck in some rhododendron and camellias too and some climbers. Yew - those hedging people in the back of gardening mags are excellent for prices and for advice

We are dealing with a similar situation and I also looked into acoustic fences. Planning permission is required for any fence over one metre that is on a boundary that is next to a road.

We have gone for the 1 metre fence and a beech hedge as we didn't want conifers either. The great thing with beech is that they keep their leaves through the winter when they are that lovely brown. Also the hedge should only need trimming once or twice a year.

DH (a landscape gardener) reckons if he wanted evergreen he would go for yew as it only needs to be trimmed once a year and it is dense and not as slow growing as people say (about 1 foot per year)

oh beech is lovely . how fast does it grow? we are planing to rip out a leylandii hedge next year and are wondering what to replace it with ( noise reduction not a problem as we live in teh country)

if you rip out your leylandii (GREAT idea to replace with beech, one of my favourite trees ever) you will need to sort out the soil big time. This may be surprisingly expensive - you will very likely need to get the leylandii roots out (not just ground down), which will leave you with big holes, and the soil that's left will be very impoverished and need lots of organic matter. But if you get it right you can plant the littlest beech whips and they will romp away.

I would have yew makes a wonderful dense hedge and not too slow growing

not hceap but very attractive

we are ok for organic matter as we live on a farm ( we are not farmers but our house is surrounded by farmland ). as we have a reasonable amount of space I am not sure whether i shooudl go for a 3 layer thing of small trees, large shrubs and small shrubs rather than a hedge. our problem is wind rather than noise IYSWIM. the letlandii hedge looks very out of place here in the country. i dont object to them in principle, I think the right ones look great in the right setting. but the previous owners let them get too big and of course you cant cut them back hard as they dont grow back from teh old wood

if you are thinking of something deeper then birch is lovely, mountain ash, amelanchier, mallow, even berberis

thnak you zippi - they woudl be good on our soil ( heavy clay) and ok in teh wind too