15 Best Fast-growing Hedge Plants For Privacy

When it comes to enjoying our gardens a sense of privacy and security is something that we all prize. Whether you live beside a busy road, in a terraced town house or a rustic cottage, the chances are that your garden will benefit from some form of natural screening. Hedges are a brilliant way of creating privacy while also bringing benefits for wildlife and the environment.

For those with the patience, slow-growing hedging plants such as Common Box are worth the wait as they will in time make fabulous thick evergreen screens but, when time is of the essence, opt for fast-growing species. Here’s our guide to some of the different types of privacy hedge plants available to buy and how best to use them.

Common Lilac - Best for Colour and Scent

Common lilac is one of the best flowering hedges for creating privacy. Its powerfully scented mauve flowers fragrance the garden throughout May and are irresistible to butterflies and bees. In summer its vibrant green foliage acts as a restful backdrop to colourful mixed borders. Plant in a sunny spot and prune annually to encourage plenty of new stems and lilac will provide good cover even in winter after its leaves have fallen. If grown as a tree, lilac can reach 7 metres tall.

Escallonia - Best for Coastal Gardens

While we all love to be beside the seaside, it’s not always a holiday for plants. Escallonia is a vigorous evergreen whose glossy green dark green leaves are tough enough to weather salty coastal winds and exposed conditions. It produces white, bell-shaped flowers in profusion throughout the summer; the fragrant blooms are highly attractive to visiting pollinators. Escallonia thrives in full sun and can reach about 3 metres. This RHS designates this variety as a ‘Plant for Pollinators’ within Hardiness Zone 4 (that is, hardy throughout most of the UK) and has also given it the coveted Award of Garden Merit’.

Blackthorn - Best for Wildlife

If you’re looking for a fast growing hedge that’s good for wildlife, blackthorn could be the answer to your prayers.  It will quickly reach 4-6 metres but can easily be kept in check by annual pruning. Its sharp black thorns create an impenetrable barrier for keeping intruders out and livestock in, while a froth of small white, open flowers brings sublime beauty in early spring. In autumn the small purple-black berries can be used to make sloe gin.

English Holly - Best for All Round Hedging

Holly is not just for Christmas – it’s also one of the best all round hedging plants. Although this evergreen native is quite slow growing, in time it will produce a dense, impenetrable hedge. Its glossy, spiny leaves are attractive and female plants carry bright red berries in winter. It’s is tough as old boots and fully hardy throughout the UK. It’s a great choice for windy and coastal locations, but equally suitable for urban environments, and thrives in any soil in full sun to partial shade. Holly responds well to clipping but can reach over 12 metres when fully grown, making it a useful option for a tall hedge.

Ramanas Rose - Best for an Informal Flowering Hedge

If you’re looking for a privacy hedge that doubles up as a floral feature, look no further than Ramanas roses (also known as rugosa roses).  Available with either red or white flowers, these roses have an exceptionally thorny growth habit and can make a dense hedge up to 2 metres tall that can be cut with a trimmer – no need for time consuming precision pruning here! The fragrant summer blooms are pollinator friendly and followed in autumn by enormous orange or red rosehips which provide further fodder for wildlife.  

Scotch Burnet Rose - Best for Dry Soil

Rosa pimpinellifolia (to give its Latin name) is the spiniest rose of them all and ideal for creating a dense, intruder repelling flowering privacy screen up to 1.2 metres high.  This tough wild rose thrives in full sun to part shade and can handle dry soil and cold exposed sites. Its pretty pink and white single flowers are scented and repeat flowering; they’re popular with pollinating insects but its copious thorns are less inviting for humans – invest in a pair of extra-thick gardening gloves when handling!

Hornbeam - Best for Shade

A handsome specimen tree, hornbeam is also an excellent hedging plant. Given fertile well-drained soil and sunny conditions, it is fast-growing and will quickly form a tight-knit, low hedge, with the potential for a tall hedge in a few more years. It will grow happily (albeit more slowly) in almost full shade. Hornbeam can be trained as an elegant pleached hedge to offer privacy without the enclosed feeling of an evergreen hedge.

Common Laurel - Best for Formal Hedges

Sometimes known as the cherry laurel, this vigorous evergreen relishes poor, dry soil and will quickly make a formal green privacy hedge with year round interest. Naturally bushy, it is almost completely foolproof to grow. Its glossy bright green leaves also absorb noise and block car lights making it ideal for roadside gardens.  Its summer flowers are white, highly scented and attractive to bees and butterflies while in autumn the shiny, black inedible ‘cherries’ that give the plant its name are popular with birds. To 6 metres.

Lawson’s Cypress - Best for Tall Year Round Screening

Sometimes called False Cypress, this large, fast growing evergreen conifer makes a brilliant choice for a tall hedge or windbreak. Its dark green foliage clips well and happily grows as a hedge, but must be clipped regularly because overgrown cypress hedges can’t be hard pruned as they won’t regenerate from old wood. Left to its own devices Lawson’s Cypress will grow into a narrow tree reaching over 40 metres high.

Leylandii - Best for Fast Growing Evergreen Hedging

Leyland Cypress is the king of the fast growing hedge plants. It’s a bit of a Marmite plant because it will grow to over 30 metres if not controlled but can be a good choice if you need to screen out an eyesore quickly. It’s not a particularly low maintenance option as it needs clipping at least twice a year but in the right place there is nothing to beat it.  Leylandii can grow over three feet a year (about a metre), a phenomenal rate of growth prompted the High Hedges Act, a law applying to any evergreen hedge over two metres and giving people legal recourse against neighbours who let their Leylandii get out of hand.

Privet – Best for Urban Gardens

If you’re looking for a quick and easy to grow front yard hedge, privet should be top of your list. This resilient evergreen can be clipped into more or less any shape – so if you want a particularly narrow hedge or a hedge that resembles a steam train or even an elephant then this is the plant for you!

Green Privet grows quickly and can withstand poor soil, shade, and atmospheric pollution making it ideal for providing privacy in locations near busy roads, where it will provide seclusion and absorb traffic noise. Golden Privet has yellow variegated foliage but is every bit as tough as its green counterpart, although best avoided for very shady conditions. Evergreen New Zealand Privet is hardy enough for most of Britain (including coastal areas) and is a dense, bushy plant that needs full sun to grow vigorously. Privet is toxic and not safe for dogs.

Hawthorn – Best for Informal Country Hedges

Our best known deciduous native hedge plant (sometimes known as quickthorn or whitethorn) makes a pretty but tough screening boundary for rural gardens in no time. It offers three seasons of interest: in spring smothered in a froth of white flowers, in summer clothed in a mass of healthy, dark green leaves, and in autumn decorated with bright red haws. Hawthorn is easy to grow, requiring only trimming to size in late winter or early spring. Up to 6 metres high.

Edible Hedges – Best for Foodies

An edible privacy hedge offers the best of both worlds: a natural screen against the outside world and a larder of fresh produce.  These tasty mixed native hedging plants will produce a good yield of fruit and nuts and combine to form a stock-friendly, dense barrier, ideal for enclosing an allotment or kitchen garden.

Berberis – Best for Deer Resistance

Berberis is a versatile flowering hedging plant whose prickly nature will deter deer and other interlopers. Darwin’s Berberis is evergreen with extremely prickly holly-like leaves and orange flowers in the spring. Julian’s Berberis (also known as Wintergreen) is also evergreen with dark green, spiny leaves and yellow flowers in spring. Green Berberis also combines beautiful foliage and flowers, but be warned! Its sharp spines invariably find their way through the stitching in leather gloves. Purple Berberis boasts magnificent purple hued leaves that contrast beautifully with its yellow flowers. Berberis will ultimately form a dense, bushy hedge up to 2-3 metres high.

Beech – Best for Foliage Colour

Green beech is a classic hedging plant and over time will make beautiful thick hedges even if planted in a single row. Plant in full sun or part shade and keep well clipped to enjoy the best of its famous foliage as it changes from zingy spring green to mellow autumn russets.  Beech holds onto its desiccated leaves through the winter, providing the privacy of an evergreen hedge but with the airiness of a deciduous hedge. Alternate green with purple beech to create a hedge with bold contrasting colours.

Tips for encouraging hedge growth

• Hedges needn’t be hard work but a little TLC goes a long way to ensuring that they grow strongly and provide the privacy you need, as quickly as possible. Here’s how to do it:
• Potted hedges plants can be planted at any time of year so you can get start growing a hedge whenever you want; you can only plant bareroot hedging between November and March
• After planting, mulch new hedges with weed control fabric or organic mulch to protect the soil
• Water well for the first two years after planting
• Carry out formative pruning for the first two years after planting (for evergreen plants this means cutting all stems down by one third in the first and second years; deciduous plants should be cut down by 15-30 centimetres in the first year, and by half in the second)
• Trim established hedges regularly to promote compact and dense growth
• Prune formal hedges 2 or 3 times a year to keep them looking smart
• Prune informal hedges once a year
• Trim hedges to a gentle ‘A’ shape, tapered on both sides so that the base is wider than the top

Key takeaway

Good boundaries make for good neighbours and we say hedges make the best boundaries! They offer the opportunity to grow a completely unique enclosure for your garden, wherever you live and whatever kind of hedge you need. There are so many creative ways of creating shelter and seclusion in the garden through hedging plants – browse Ashridge’s full range of hedging plants to find the right privacy hedging solution for your garden.