Your Garden Fence - A Practical Defence and a Garden Feature

A garden fence is more than just a boundary marker. It has two other very important roles:

1. Garden fencing is a very obtrusive part of your garden, and as such should be considered as garden decor. You can design the most beautiful of gardens, but then destroy its overall effect with a poor choice of fence from an appearance point of view.

For example, aluminum fences are very popular, but if you have an olde worlde garden, an aluminum fence is likely to look out of place anmd ruin the character of the garden, despite its practical robustness. When considering the fence, try to anticipate how you want your garden to look when it is mature, and select a type of fence that will blend in and complement the garden itself.

A critical choice is the material, so selecting between aluminum, wooden, wrought iron, other metal such as in chain link fences, is a critical point in your fencing. The type of garden plays an important part in your choice, but so can location.

2. In some locations, especially in rural situations with animals and urban locations with intruders, the garden fence can have a crucial defensive role. In that case, you want the fence to be impenetrable to whatever it is you want to keep at bay. Deer, for example can quickly destroy all your hard work, so if you have local deer on the search for food, you will probably want to build a robust fence with appearance as a secondary feature.

It is not just deer you may want to keep out. You want some depth to the fence below ground to stop and rabbits and other rodents burrowing under the fence. Deeper burrowers such as moles will not easily be kept out with a fence.

There are many types, designs, shapes and sizes of fence at your disposal. The idea of the fence is simple – form an impenetrable barrier around the bounty of your harvest. That may be easier said than done however. Nature’s offensive line is brutal when it comes to breaking through your barriers.

The height of the fence is also an important choice, especially if you are trying to stop deer reaching into your garden over a fence. In that case, a 4 foot high fence should be enough to keep the deer from stretching in to munch your garden treasures.

Where a stronger and maybe less attractive fence is a necessity, then do not worry about appearance in the long term. A skilled garden will soon have well chosen climbing plants making it look like a piece of nature's art.