Gardening on exposed sites

Exposed gardens often have good views as they tend to be on a hill or near the coast, but you don't have to live near the sea or on top of a hill to have a garden that is exposed. Rooftop gardens and hills in town suffer from powerful gusts of wind

To grow what you like, you need to make sheltered sites for patios, arbours and places to sit. This means creating secondary hedges and fencing inside your garden – I would suggest that lavender hedging is an ideal choice.

Because walls can create wind eddies make sheltered pockets using evergreen plants or filtering internal structures such as trellis in front of the wall to help divide the wind and limit its effect on the plants. In addition you can design sunken areas of the garden to provide shelter for patios, seating and planting by building raised beds.

Take care where you position fragile structure such as greenhouses. You should make sure these are in a sheltered spot, with a separate wind break, if necessary. Wind causes physical damage to plants, breaking limbs and stems, and drying out foliage of evergreens. Salty winds are even more destructive. This means you need to pick plants that are suitable but also to be aware that their eventual height may mean their top third really thrashes around in the worst weather – if you plant them in tubs or raised beds, it could be as much as their top half that gets stressed by the wind. So if you’ve got containers or raised beds, you should try to keep your plant choice to low growing varieties.

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