very crappy yard (no grass, mostly trees)
A lot of us would consider that to be a nice yard.
That’s fair. I worded that poorly. It’s a crappy yard because it’s drab and boring right now. It doesn’t have grass, and is mostly trees. It’s plain, and I want to spruce it up somehow.
Well the obvious solution is spruce.
Personally I've got a chain link fence, so I've planted ivy. In your case, any thick woody plant would probably do. Which one exactly depends on your location and climate.
The real solution would be to fix the ground level, but that's a lot of labor if you're doing it yourself by hand.
Oh god, not ivy. I don't know about where you are, but in a lot of places, it is extremely invasive and impossible to get rid of.
I'm in USDA zone 6. Yes, English ivy is invasive, but I've never seen it go crazy around here. I've never had trouble controlling or removing it.
Oriental bittersweet, Virginia creeper, and knotweed, on the other hands, are the real problems in my area.
The main thing with bamboo is trimming it low, so that it bushes up instead of growing tall and bending over (where it propagates). There's a bunch of varieties, you want clumping bamboos that don't tend to spread much
I would echo the recommendations to avoid bamboo. However it's hard to recommend what else to plant without knowing 1) your geographic region, 2) sun exposure of the area in question, 3) what species of trees are in the yard.
I don't have any experience with bamboo but I'd imagine you wouldn't get the bushy foliage low down that you're looking for. How about perennial herbs, like thyme, sage, lavender, rosemary etc? As well as plugging the gap at the bottom of your fence, you would get amazing aromas in your garden and the flowers on them can be beautiful and beneficial to insects. In my experience perennial herbs are resilient and low maintenance too.
Some varieties are ‘runners’ which spread via underground rhizomes. Some varieties are ‘clumpers’ which also spread that way but much much slower. I would be wary of even planting a clumping type, because if you ever change your mind and want to remove it, it can still be challenging.
People have great luck growing some smaller clumping varieties in containers which is probably the safest method. I’m actually trying to do that too just to jazz up an ugly concrete spot
Depends on the “raised bed” if you just do some board on the ground to make the dirt higher, the plants can still escape. If you have a raised “garden” where its soil in separate container raised off the ground, it’s fine. But it sounds like you want the former, not the latter, so don’t plant spreading stuff in them.
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