stone asks about our death hedge goals:
What are your goals for this ‘death hedge’? At my house, I want a native hazard hedge . Unfortunately the plants I’m finding to work with aren’t natives. I have lots of hardy orange and Cherokee rose going in, I’m also transplanting American holly into the perimeter plantings.
Trying to keep it native here in Southeast North America would lower our options. No Eleagnus and no trifoliate orange, both of which are good hedge plants. Though we could plant native Osage orange and thorny honey locust/black locust. And there’s always poison ivy.
As for our Death Hedge plans, the goal is to create a strip of wild, thorny, thick forest rather than a standard single-row hedge.
We planted some trifoliate oranges and some osage orange seedlings along one edge, but it doesn’t cover much area. The main area of the hedge would be interspersed with a few mature trees that cast some shade, so we need both shade and sun plants.
My current idea is to just start sticking a ton of various plants out there from the nursery. We have a lot of honey locust seedings so we’ll probably stick some of those. We also have some razor-thorned roses we started from an old home site. We have awful prickly pears covered in glochids, and we have a few silverthorn Eleagnus.
To fill in more area, I could also plant some of the sadder looking ornamental shrubs from Atmore Farm & Garden. We have a few ugly junipers and arborvitae and some other ornamentals I don’t even know the name of.
Whatever we plant is also going to be invaded by non-native invasives, like privet and popcorn tree, which show up everywhere here. People are endlessly yanking them from their azalea hedges and gardenia plantings. We’re also certain to end up with smilax vines.
Instead of fighting all these, we’ll just let them fill in where they like and become a rough thicket. If it wants to grow and block the view and pedestrian traffic, why not? It’s hard to stop anyhow.
As always, I am tempted to plant food plants. However, fruit trees would attract attention and we don’t want that. Chestnuts would be fine, though, and we’re getting some bare root trees very soon at the shop. We could also seed the area with Dioscorea alata yam bulbils which would make roots beneath the canopy.
The trick is to just start planting. And that keeps getting delayed.
That’s the plan so far. Feel free to share any more ideas you have in the comments.
