Katalin MARÁCZI
Garden Area Design with Hedges (1.)
History, Functions, Types and Design

(Summary)

Hedges have always played an important role in garden area design in historic and aesthetic aspects alike and they still do today. These plantations – the hedges –, which are narrow, continuous and have branches at the bottom, are created in the garden area with the purpose of protection or border creation. Their functions are set according to our expectations, but this requires precise and farseeing design. We have to bear in mind how big our area is and we have to decide how tall our hedges can grow in a certain time, how wide they can be, how large an area of our garden we might devote to hedges, how much cutting and care they need, what we want to cover with them, to what extent they can be transparent in summer as well as in winter time, whether they should be green only or they should have other decorative values (blooms and flowers), to what extent they can be penetratable or stinger, our natural conditions (soil, slope, water supply), to what extent they must be demanding in their environment, how much money we can spend on the creation and maintenance, whether we are about to build a fence or the hedge is supposed to substitute that etc.

The first part of our article introduces the short history of the use of hedges, the list of types of hedges and the formation of hedges to the reader. In this way we learn about the individual, cut and movable hedge types and the way they can be created. It is important to know about certain design rules as well, concerning how hedges can be planted next to a fence or on parcel boundaries.