My raised beds are 1 foot tall. the raspberry roots would have to grow one foot down, and underneath. i suppose they could. So far they have not. You could make them taller. I seen some recently that were 2.5 feet high. I made a 2x24 foot long bed. Other beds are attached, but each bed has a barrier, so to get into the other bed they need to grow up a foot too. If they get into the grass, i don't care, i'll just mow them down. Here is a photo of the bed from june. A side view were you can see construction a little better. The beds to the right are 4x4 and have a blueberry plant in the middle. I can control the soil PH this way. In ground here with blueberries is out of the question. The blueberries are surrounded by strawberries. They will be removed once the blueberry plants are bigger. All plants planted this year. Picture taken on 2013 06 24. The last bed is 8x12 and will be where all the raspberry runners will go, well have gone. it's full now! During the season i grew corn in the bed. i got 65 ears!

What is the purpose of planting along the outside face of the fence? Since the fence supplies any need for privacy, I would assume it is just for a decorative element? 5' is pretty narrow for much woody plant material - even most fastigiate plants will eventually fill the area rapidly and in time could extend into the roadway. You could of course prune to keep in size but a bit of a PITA to need to do that routinely on the exterior of the property. Columnar arborvitae like Thuja occidentalis 'Smaragd' would work but extremely common and vastly boring. And really no need for something of that mature height. Since you don't really need the height, I'd suggest one of three alternatives: 1) leave the lawn as is (least interesting but also with very low maintenance). 2) Replace lawn with groundcover, interspersing a landscape boulder or two as desired. 3) Plant with a selection of taller, upright ornamental grasses (Miscanthus, Panicum). These will offer a lot of seasonal interest throughout the year and require minimal maintenance. You could also toss in a couple of boulders as well but do avoid the repetition of three grasses, one boulder, three grasses, etc.

No, not straight line. That's why I'm cautioning you that this must be worked out in PLAN view ... so you can know what you're looking at. What I'm showing is a scheme ... generalities. A designer would fine tune its specifics ... what the trees are, and their form, size, etc. The two bright green trees are yours already in place. I'm just showing them grown some. The 6 trees right of the others are new ones I added. 3 smaller are in a line along the fence. The larger ones are in a triangular arrangement with two in the back row, thus the swelled bed. But ... do in plan view for accuracy and correctness. You'd plant smaller trees at the midline of a 6' or 8' depth bed, i.e., 3' or 4' from fence. Larger trees in a larger bed would be farther from the fence but worked out by the designer depending on the exact trees. In general, I think multi-trunk (clumping) trees have more presence, especially if they are part of a screen. But it's your choice. You can use single trunk trees if you prefer. I think they tend to look a little skimpier, but are probably fine in later years.

We are thinking that we will place them on the ground (on top of screening and landscape fabric) and level them out. Then cover the base with large river rock to weight them down. We could also drill pilot holes on the front and back side of the base to allow us to screw them into the ground with anchors. We could use rectangular planters in front to hold decorative grasses. We would need deeper bases than shown below but this idea. Planters and river rock to disguise the base of the screen. We like the wider board look as it's cleaner.