Sound deadening hedge

Which is the best hedging plant to reduce traffic noise in a garden fronted by an occasionally busy road? Needs to be reasonably fast growing - that is, I'd like some sound deadening within a year or two, not in 2020 :hehe:
Cheers
Richard

 

I think for sound-deadening you want to be as close to the noise as possible - so right on the edge of the road. If the road / etc. causing the noise is not adjacent to your property I'm not sure planting something will help much.

For speed you have to compromise:

If you have something fast, like Leylandii, it will grow 3 feet a year. But, when it gets to the height you want, you will be cutting it three times a year ...

Many evergreen hedge plants will do 1 foot a year, particularly if you give it some Nitrogen in the spring (Sulphate of Ammonia, or a organic / slower release - such as Blood / Blood, Fish and Bone.) - if it grows a foot a year then cutting it once a year will be enough, and you won;t be trying to lop 3 feet off it! so a lot less maintenance than Leylandii.

Beware that Leylandii, rightly IMHO, has a bad reputation. You cannot cut it back hard into old wood (it won't regrow) so if you miss cutting it one season then you are stuck with it a couple of feet thicker than it was the previous year. That applies to any future occupants of your property. It also suffers from a bug that can cause it to die back significantly (this is relatively recent in this country I think)

My money would be on Thuja Plicata Atrovirens. Quick enough, but not too fast like Leylandii; makes a smart evergreen hedge (well clipped it will be pretty much as smart as yew); will tolerate being cut back if that becomes necessary.

Last alternative is to buy large/mature hedging plants - so you can choose something that grows 1 foot a year, but is already 6 feet tall (say). "No trouble, just a little expense" as the saying goes!

Actually, last alternative would be to plant two rows - Thuja Plicata Atrovirens where you want the hedge, and then a second row (whichever side has space, but preferably on the north side) of Leylandii and plan to cut that out in 10 years. The previous occupant here did that - I suspect on the advice of a landscape gardener - but they never took the Leylandii out, and they were 40'+ tall when we got here, and the remaining Thuja very scrawny as a result. We took the Leylandii out, but the result is a mess that will take 5 years to recover and thicken up. Pity really ... but its certainly an option.

If you need the screen to be taller than you can reach then consider how you will cut it each year - cherry-picker, scaffolding, ladders etc. as that may have a bearing on what you do.

If this is a boundary that you can "abandon" (no neighbours, plenty of "width" available) then you can just plant a barrier and not plan to cut it at all. In that instance Monterey Pine or similar might be good enough. They will grow tall, but not as dense as a hedge, and most probably faster than a hedge. Dunno about how good they are for noise deadening though. They will certainly cause the wind to go up-and-over !

 

I don't know if it would work with traffic, but bamboo is well known (in the poultry keeping world anyway!) for deadening the noise of a cock(s) crowing, which is a lot louder and more intrusive than traffic...although not continuous...

It also grows very fast!

 

two rows of something is good - but also if you had hoped to plant a nice border in front of them remember any hedging will leach out moisture and give a lot of shade making growing anything smaller close to difficult - so pick something nice to look at too.
Jen

 

I'm pretty sure whatever you grow won't make a lot of difference. As has been said it needs to be "thick and high" but I don't think it will reduce it that much. Though by the time whatever you plant has grown you might think it has reduced the noise but more likely you will have become used to it.

In my teens a friend lived with his parents in a house two doors away from the end of a culdesac in Chiswick. At the end of the road was the District Line up on a high embankment. The first time I went to his house, to help him with a car he'd just bought, as we had our heads under the bonnet a train rumbled past.

"Don't you get fed up with that noise?"

"What noise?"

See what I mean?

 

The seem to put solid fence up alongside the dual carriage way when it goes through urban areas (dunno if that is for light pollution from headlights, or for noise?)

If "noise" then that might be another option. Quick too!

 

They have them on the motorway, there's another golf course between it and ours, but we can still hear the traffic if the wind is in the right direction.

 

Some interesting info here:

http://www.trafficnoise.org/

Takes about solid walls though, but anything taller than line-of-site to the noise source (tyres and higher-up for the noise from truck engines and exhaust) will make little difference - so maybe it doesn't need to be very high, unless your house is on a hill - and maybe that accounts for the fact that the stuff along motorways is only 8' - 10' tall.

I found this useful too:

http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=6129

which comes back to a solid wall (or hit&miss fence - i.e. with gaps - which relieves wind pressure too) and suggestion that vegetation will be less effective - also that much height above line-of-site won;t achieve much - coz' sound waves are travelling straight - not bouncing off the clouds, or creeping over things and then back down the other side.

So ... maybe an instant solution is possible ...

 

I'll add a bit more information, in case there are more suggestions.

Currently I have two tall, unsightly conifers (two neighbours, both "experts", are certain that they are, respectively, either Juniper or Golden Leylandii. Anyway...). The branches and foliage come down to the ground, and I believe do muffle some of the sound. But they will be coming down.

This leaves me with about 30m of open frontage, with the road about 5 or 6m in front of the house (a bungalow). I have enough space for planting as deep as I like, really, as I don't use that part of the garden for anything. In theory, I could plant 3m deep before getting to the drive that runs in front of the house. I don't want to go that deep, byt 2 or 3 rows of something wouldn't be difficult.

I want something more attractive than I have at the moment, that can be managed at 2 or 3 metres high (the road is a couple of feet lower than the garden, on the other side of a narrow footpath.

What I can't do anything about are the mouths of the drive at either side, which are also adjacent to the neighbours' drives.

Cheers
Richard