Make Your Garden Fences Disappear With This Surprising Color
Give tired fences a face-lift with a hue that blurs boundaries and provides a dramatic backdrop for plants
Lauren Dunec Hoang
January 29, 2017
Houzz Editor; landscape designer and former garden editor for Sunset Magazine and in-house designer for Sunset's Editorial Test Garden. Her garden designs have been featured in the Sunset Western Garden Book of Landscaping, Sunset Western Garden Book of Easy-Care Plantings (cover), Inhabitat, and POPSUGAR.
Houzz Editor; landscape designer and former garden editor for Sunset Magazine and... More
White picket and natural wood fences may be more common, but garden fences painted black can be surprisingly effective in the landscape. Dark fences act as a stunning backdrop for bright green foliage, provide understated privacy where needed and make garden borders disappear. Take a look at these examples of how a dark hue can transform a garden fence, and you may be inspired to get out your paintbrush.
Highlight plant structure. Black and charcoal-gray fences work well as backdrops for formal plantings. The dark hues look elegant and sophisticated, and provide a stage to highlight the form of espaliered trees and clipped hedges.
Here, a dark fence serves as a backdrop for a double-tiered hedge of clipped boxwood and photinia shrubs trained as small trees. A white fence in the same setting would draw the eye more than this dark one, taking attention away from the form of the planting.
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Make property boundaries disappear. Dark fences visually recede, reading more like the shadow cast by a tree than a man-made barrier. To further draw the eye away from property borders, plant beds in the foreground with silver and pale green foliage.
Provide understated screening. Far less stark than white, black can be a more effective color for subtle privacy and screening. Here, black fences enclose an urban terrace to screen surrounding buildings and create an intimate gathering place.
In this garden in San Diego, dark fencing provides an elegant screen to hide the home’s air-conditioning and utility units. Variegated New Zealand flax, feathery grasses and a simple water feature also help draw attention toward the garden.
Show off spring blooms and fall color. Deep forest-green fences can work just as well as black to provide a dark background for pale blooms. In this garden in Melbourne, Australia, white and blue agapanthus blooms nearly float against the deep green backdrop.
In fall, dark fences complement the rich colors of changing leaves, highlighting gold and orange tones and creating a moody pairing with plum and burgundy foliage. Here, a dark green fence sets the stage for a fall show of golden birch leaves.
Make small gardens feel bigger. White fences or walls enclosing a small space can feel confining, while darker hues tend to visually sink into the background. In this Sydney garden, a small deck outside the kitchen window has just enough room for a cafe table for two. Painting the wall a medium charcoal and adding subtle down-cast lights make the space feel larger and more inviting.
Give property fences a contemporary edge. A fresh coat of dark paint can transform a simple border fence into a landscape feature that sets the tone of the garden upon arrival.
Dark paint also can be used to integrate traditional elements of a landscape with those that are more modern. For example, in this garden in Boston, a dark stain (Benjamin Moore’s Black Forest) gives a classic fence design a fresh, contemporary look.
Update your kitchen garden. Giving fences a wash of dark paint can create an entirely new look. In this Connecticut kitchen garden, a dark coat of paint and end caps on the fence posts elevate the perimeter fencing from being purely functional to an attractive design feature.
Likewise, a few coats of a dark semitransparent stain (Cabot’s Slate Gray) over the fence boards and raised bed give a contemporary feel to this edible garden in San Jose, California. Plus, the dark backdrop highlights the form of a squash vine spilling out of the raised bed.
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I am researching the idea of fencing that blends into the background since we have an old, deer-trampled galvanized grey chainlink fence and are weighing our options. Thank todddec for the pictures. They are VERY helpful.
I'd like others thoughts/comments and observations (especially the latter)!
Besides this article, I've found two others touching on the topic and one that wants you buy a $1000+ milled & linseed/turpentine lattice sections for a "natural wood" look.
Like this article, one of the two suggests spray painting chainlink in a flat, natural green or black/charcoal for maximum blend. It complains that most green chainlink fences are not a green you would ever find in nature. It also emphasizes that flat paint colors blur the line more as dan61 points out.
The other article simply points out that the fence in the front (and between yards) has a very different purpose than the fence in the back yard, and while it is nice that they be coordinated or complementary, they need not be too much the same.
Chain link on back and old wooden one that I share with neighbors. I think I might get some type of sheeting or plastic.
I have been reading many articles on black/charcoal fences, but not finding a lot of paint colors. Three that I have identified in searching a lot are (all by Benjamin Moore) 1) Dragon's Breath - shows some brown/green/gray in its dark depths, 2) Wrought Iron - nice charcoal, some blue in it 3) Black Beauty - dark almost black but dark dark gray. I'm deciding myself and leaning towards Wrought Iron (my house is gray with black shutters and white trim so it compromises between the gray and the black).