Noise and gardening

There’s nothing worse on a lovely summer’s day than to have to contend with screaming neighbours and their horrible kids, roaring traffic, planes passing overhead and the ambient horrors of other peoples’ stereo systems. You might think there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself against noise, but actually there’s quite a lot that can be done to reduce or mitigate what’s called noise pollution.

Hedges act as baffles – they funnel and divert noise away from hearers. Instead of planting straight hedges around the edges of your garden, consider bringing them towards the middle of the garden and back out again, making garden ‘rooms’ as this breaks the noise in several directions and, of course, keep them as high as you can without blocking your neighbours’ light. The denser the hedge the better the effect against noise and the lower you are in the garden, the less you’ll here, so if you’re on a sunlounger and you have six foot hedges you’ll hear 30% less noise volume than a person sitting in a chair behind a three foot hedge.

Trellis – again, trellis breaks noise, especially if it is planted with tightly growing annuals like sweet peas or the cup and saucer vine or cobea scandens. Don’t just put them round the edge of the garden. Plant big pots with fan shaped trellis and annual climbers and use them to block noise just as you would to block light.

Water features – these break up noise by setting themselves against it. Because water is fractal (the patterns never repeat) it counterpoints itself to the regular rhythms of music and traffic. Waterfalls are wonderful for this, but even just a small wall mounted fountain will work to distract you from outside noise as long as you focus on the water sound.

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