Our top 4 screening plants

If you are looking to hire a selection of plants for an event at your school or college, our new series of blogs have been written to showcase some of the inspiring and unique examples waiting for you at our nursey. Whether you are looking to screen event facilities or dress a marquee to match the green spaces your students and parents enjoy elsewhere within your grounds, we have the solution.

Our School & College Plant Hire Service is designed to rapidly meet your requirements, creating an instant impact, making your life easier, providing expert advice and guidance, and efficiently reducing your turn around time. We deliver directly to you and collect. Reassuringly all our plants are Plant Healthy certified. If our blogs inspire you, then do contact us – we’d love to arrange a meeting at our nursery to discuss how we can help you.

Liquidambar styraciflua (Sweet Gum) – Panels

A stunning columnar tree, growing to 12 metres x 3 metres over 20 years. It has fresh green and deeply lobed summer leaves which are a bit like a maple, quite finely textured, that become a brilliant orange to purplish red in autumn.

This tree has an especially powerful architectural shape which we adore, and as it’s so versatile we can always find a place for this tree (or several). Imagine stately rows flanking a school driveway in symmetrical ranks, saluting a welcome as you pass, or a pair standing sentinel at the sweeping edge of your crisp grounds. You can also use the narrow columns to introduce height to a broader palette of other pleasing and playful shapes like crisply clipped shrubs and mounds of cloudlike evergreens.

Carpinus betulus (Hornbeam) – Standards

Great to screen the top of an existing wall or fence, to creating a softened green space ready for entertainment purposes.

These are trained onto a frame to be planted at intervals of approximately 5-6ft to create a pleached hedge. These trees are deciduous and native and this practice is an ancient tradition in Europe – mostly for creating avenues in grand entrances but nowadays often used as a neat and formal approach to giving privacy.

Phyllostachys (Bamboo)

Bamboos evergreen, fast growing and hardy characteristics make it ideal for a solid screening option with a beautiful feathery look, turning your harsh brick wall into a soft and peaceful scene.

Their thickly growing foliage and densely clustered canes are almost completely windproof, thereby making a perfect screening or hedging plant.

We sell bamboo barrier which you could also use if you’re worried about it getting carried away.

Betula pendula (Birch)

These have been particularly beautifully grown as multi-stemmed specimens on the nursery. Grows to 40ft after 40 years.

It’s happy in any reasonably well-drained soil. Allow enough space for its shape to be seen. They can be grouped together in a small grove for a stunning screening effect.

The best time to prune birch trees is late summer or early autumn. It’s usually only needed to remove dead, diseased and injured branches.