Wall of the day - Garden Wall

In urban housing estates, houses are built quite close together for developers to maximise their land and profit. Unless you can afford to own hectares of land or live on a hill by yourself, neighbours are not something you can determine or choose.

Chances are that your neighbours are more privy to the daily on-goings in your house than you would like. If you are blessed, if you have good neighbours and don’t mind being friends with them. But even so, it is still good to have privacy, especially in your “outdoor room”.

After all, it is human nature to desire boundaries for a sense of security. Fortunately, we can be more creative in an outdoor room setting than with the four walls of an indoor space.
 

Here are a few suggestions for your outdoor room “walls”:
• Hedges
• Creepers (good for those with chain-link fences)
• Lattices (promotes air-flow and cross ventilation)
• Louvred panels

Garden walls can be aesthetically done as a feature wall especially in tight and limited space.

Outdoor feature wall 
Just like a typical room, you can create a focal point wall using any of the three suggestions above. To add a little style, you can decorate with more types of plants (essentially, creating a wall garden) or design a water feature.

It is important to take into consideration lighting for your feature wall, so that you can still highlight and bring out nature’s beauty during the night or on rainy days.

Once you have one garden “wall” as a main feature, the other “walls” can be focused on privacy. For an outdoor room, the space should not be sealed, so two to three-sided walls are more than enough. They should also not feel too enclosed, allowing the natural pleasure of the outdoors to work its magic.

For example, if lattice is used as a wall, you can give it a unique look by creating a window that overlooks another part of the garden or a water feature.

Using plants to screen and beautify an existing fence. Some plants are also edible, such as the bunga telang (butterfly pea or clitorea ternatea), commonly used as food dye in local snacks.

Don’t worry about being unfriendly, garden walls are more for aesthetics and is less unsociable compared to a cement or brick wall. Furthermore, it can be made flexible enough to allow for interaction. Your children can still play around the fencing, and you can chat or share food with your neighbours.

But if your neighbours are not likely to win any friendship award, you may consider planting more bushy and thorny plants to send a “subtle” message. Thereafter, if relations improve, you can always trim it to eye-level. That’s the beauty of a “garden wall”.

Before and after: From a design fault (top) to a “wall” feature.