A good starting point would be a conversation with the neighbour. Imagine that he has just bought this trailer and intends to shift it on ebay at a profit. Meanwhile you spend a fortune on hiding an eyesore and the "some sort of non-traditional fence material/design combined with plants" then becomes the eyesore when the trailer is sold. It's thanksgiving, invite them over for a drink and talk about it.

Lemonlime,
Sell your house now.
Good Luck.

High Country Gardens carries perennials, trees and shrubs for your part of the world. Perhaps you can find something interesting and useful there.

Seems to me that your neighbour has installed a defacto fence by parking this thing there quasi-permanently, and that maybe the fence-height-enforcement people could be brought to put pressure on them, not on you.

Perhaps you could also plant something like ivy that providentially grow over the trailer whenever it is parked for a long time. They might get annoyed at having to cut it free every time they want to move it. OK I'm kidding I would never suggest planting ivy anywhere. Schizophragma maybe, or Aristolochia.

But to be honest, I live in a semi-industrial area where much of my vista is chain link, masonry block, and dumpsters, and yet I have great pleasure in my garden. Is this really so bad? Install your 4-foot fence and enjoy the area inside it. By designing your yard around the objective of blocking out what your neighbour does I think you will be compromising your own accomplishment. If you do something great, you may find that the neighbour is inspired to do better. And if not, you'll still have a great yard.

KarinL

I understand completely.My neighbor built a raised driveway one foot from our property line(without a permit)so that he could park his boat and trailer. He also refuses to put up a fence to block it.Hence the backdrop for my front garden is a boat and trailer. I enjoy my gardens and hate looking at his boat and trailer so my only option is to block the view. I built raised beds and planted a row of arborvitae this summer.I also might try to squeeze in some lilac next year because the arborvitae grow slower. Besides raised beds you might also consider building up some type of berm (raised dirt) that will help to block the view.

I understand completely, too, and suggest going with the arson idea. Just kidding (sort of). I don't think you have much choice--have you thought about Italian Cypress? They don't take up much room.

Is there any way you can post a photograph lemonlime or a plan or failing that can you describe the layout as accurately as you can? Is your drive right next to theirs? If not how much space is available on your side of the trailer?

Palo verde, large yuccas and, if you can get them from the Cactus Rescue organization, some of the larger varieties of cactus (saguaro excluded unless you are very lucky!).There are nice native plants that make a nice screen when planted in staggered layers, and are not irrigation dependent (although they need watering to get established).

What does "raised bed" mean? Someone said that and I don't know what that means. Is it like a big hill and then trees on top?

It means a planting area that has been created above the natural ground level by using landscape timbers, brick, fieldstone, railroad ties, or other such material. The bed can be box-shaped and free-standing, such as on a lawn, or may be a retaining wall of sorts with an already-existing wall, side-of-house or other solid structure as the back.

In a sense, it's like a bottomless planting container (the ground itself serves as the bottom) that allows you to grow plants in places where the natural soil is either poor or non-existant (rock ledge, sand, etc.). You can fill it with good soil and compost and create an oasis.

Thanks, I appreciate everyone's ideas (although selling the house now isn't an option, plus I like it here).

Karin1, you make some good points about the defacto fence, and I definitely don't want to end up making a huge mass of plantings the focal point....I do agree, that it might be best to compromise, put in the short fence and dwell on the more gratifying part of the project.

Here are a few pictures. The property line runs between the sideyards, neither of which are driveways, however, the city code allows them to improve the surface (gravel or paved) and use it for parking if it doesn't exceed the total square footage of paved surface that's allowed.

The first pic is of the yard last summer. I decided this spring that I would not water this summer, let the yard die out, and convert. I couldn't in good consciousness continue to use that much water.

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Something to think about: If you had a structure of large boulders (at least 1/4 ton) that would create a barrier to prevent him encroaching on your property. If it was made in such a way that it raised that part of your yard and had pockets of soil built in you could plant pines or some other conifer to block out the trailer. The link here does not show exactly what I have in mind but the pictures will give you the general idea.
http://www.pacelandscape.com/boulder_walls.html

Hello Lemon Lime,

Good for you for having a social conscience and going lawn free. We live in Las Vegas and have no lawn front or back even though we're on a well so our water is inexpensive. It just doesn't feel right to be wasting all that water on a lawn when it's in such short supply here in the Southwest. And it's way more creative and fun landscaping without the standard lawn ribbed with evergreen shrubs.

For screening the desert trees are just too wide but there are some great shrubs that love the heat of the desert and are drought tolerant. It's a little colder here so you will be able to grow more frost tender plants than we can but some we've used for screening are:

Cordia parvifolia-delicate white crepe paper flowers all summer on a grey-green deciduous bush. Gets about 8 feet tall, loves the heat and I've had more comments on this one than anything else.

Cordia boissieri- Evergreen in Phoenix I'm sure although we get leaf loss in our colder winters. Can get to be a small tree but you can keep it a shrub of whatever size. Huge, unusual in a drought tolerant plant, velvet leaves and big white flowers all summer. Also known as texas olive.

Spartium junceum-spanish broom. Mine is about eight feet tall and six feet wide. It is evergreen and looks like a whole lot of vertical green stems. Different but I love it with grasses as they fountain down while it shoots up. Pretty yellow bird shaped flowers in the spring.

Cassia species-Although they are supposed to get five or six feet tall I recently cut back a nemophila that was turning into a small tree. First I had to wait for it to finish it's five months of late winter through spring flowering though. The australian ones are evergreen and spring blooming but the southwest native, wislenzii, is summer blooming and decicuous.

Cortaderia selloana-Pampas grass. Wow it looks spectacular this time of year with those gorgeous ivory plumes that it keeps all fall and winter. I have the smaller 'pumila' that gets about eight feet tall with fronds, five feet without but there are bigger ones. They do need to be cut to the ground in spring but bounce back fast.

There are so many more wonderful plants you can use to screen that view and if you make a nice mix of low water use shrubs with grasses(not lawn) you may end up loving your screen so much you'll be glad you had a reason that spurred you into creating it. I'll bet your botanical gardens and water district in phoenix will give you a lot of ideas.

Happy Gardening, Maria

hello,
i just watched a new victory garden program on PBS.
the were addressing this same issue in Las Vegas. They ended
up planting a row of giant timber bamboo to screen a concrete block wall topped with barbed wire and backed by
high tension electrical lines and an industrial setting.

this might work for you as well. althogh bamboo did seem abit odd for a 'dry' setting like las vegas. you could
research smaller clumping bamboos fro your problem.

diggerb

One thing to think about is that this IS a temporary problem. In this case "temporary" might be 5 years or more. I would just be worried that you will spend a lot of time and money on this and then just as your landscape starts to fill in the neighbor will more or sell his RV...maybe to the guy on the other side of you. ;-)

To me it seems that if you are going to live in an urban/suburban area then neighbors, their houses and their stuff comes along with the package. An RV might not be the ideal backdrop to a garden but you cannot spend all your time focusing on blocking your neighbors. To me it would make sense to block the view from key viewing points (a window or sitting area) but I would not try for a full out screen.

- Brent

Some of the smaller growing evergreen trees such as Rhus lancea, Schinus terebinthifolius, Nerium oleander trained as a standard or multitrunk, Acacia species and Cassia/Senna species might be good dense evergreen screens that could be combined with a more drought tolerant planting design and also screen out your neighbor's motorhome.

The reaction that people have to situations like this is that they have to totally block out the eyesore. I like to say that design is about enhancing the positive and mitigating the negative.

Sometimes it is hard for us to step back and recognize similar situations that exist which are mitigated well enough that we do not recognize them as being the same.

One way to deal with this is to add some screening and some distraction to minimize the impact of what is left in view. If you take away the actual sight of the vehicle sitting on the ground almost on the property line it has some mitigating quality (a hedge that goes right down to the ground - even if it is not very tall). The second thing to do is to put foreground in front of the upper part of the vehicle to add depth to the foreground (a pair of trees with trunks holding up a canopy that is taller than the vehicle). This situation is probably all over your area, but is so effective that it is hard to recognize it.

The vehicle will still be in plain sight, but it becomes background - Psychological screening.

Laag makes a very good point, that completely screening the property line is not an absolute necessity, and the combined height plantings recommended may be better in scale and proportion for the enjoyment of views of and out from your house than a total hedge or tree screen would be.

That's terrific advice, and I'm taking notes. With that in mind, it also occurred to me that your strongest need is really just to screen it from your own view when looking out your front windows, and that should be fairly easy to do. The view when walking up toward the front door is a little more problematic, but creating that background as advised, with a focus closer to the door, should do wonders.

I think there is more to it than just screening the view out of the window. There is an experience that you and your guests have when they approach your property, when they park in the driveway, when they walk up to the door, and any other passive or active thing that is affected by this.

It is really not the eyesore that is the problem. It is how the experience of your activities is affected by that "thing". You are really after making a more positive experience for those activities. Screening it is but one mitigating measure.

Take away the camper and it looks like you'll have a basketball game or a parked car to look at anyway. The camper may be saving a rolling basketball visiting your lawn (or toast, or whatever will become of it) along with those that would fetch it. You can't think one dimensionally and have complete success.

If a hedge or a fence is considered as a mitigating measure, then the trees are considered as an enhancement to that mitigation. Further enhancement could be a colorful planting in front of the hedge or fence that pulls your attention lower and a layer further foward. You can go on and on.

Thank you, there are a lots of good ideas to think about here. I think after some consideration, even if it were an option to construct a 12 ft tall fence, I wouldn't. I think some huge monolithic structure is part of what bugs me about the situation to begin with, and just because it would suddenly be mine and not theirs (wall vs camper), wouldnt necessarily fix things.

I think my starting point will be some a shorter fence that runs the property line between the two side yards, but a fence that is attractive and will make a backdrop for the plantings and overall feel of the new yard.

Right now, I'm strongly leaning towards a bamboo fence, similar to some of these:

Here is a link that might be useful: bamboo fence

I realize this article was written 14 years ago. Hoping that someone might respond and reactivate the discussion. I could have written it, with the exception that in my case it’s an old inoperable boat instead of a camper. I wish I could see the author’s front yard after she solved the problem.

I have a very nice and helpful neighbor but his yard is a mess. He has three vehicles stored on his property, none of which run. I have spent a lot of money and done a lot of work on my front yard, even removed a very old messy olive tree. (I have to work around the stump left behind, unable to plant in some of that area). But now his boat is even more visible. Hedges of an evergreen nature do not fit my desert landscape design. But I have read a few responses here that do include tall plants more fitting with a cacti landscape. Purchasing a fence or a trellis, or going the route of buying tall plants, it’s all expensive. I do hate HOA’s, but must admit they come in handy in cases like this.

Funny you mention an HOA, because as much as you have my sympathy about your neighbor’s vehicles, my HOA would never allow you to have a tree stump nor a desert landscape with cacti in your front yard.