You can plant the trees, but I wouldn't even think about trying the hedgerow until you are there full time. It's something that rather by definition is going to take a fair amount of maintenance, and finding a knowlegeable person to do it isn't easy.

The problem is that practically everything here wants to turn into forest. The usual first line of defense against this jungle is the lawn mower. However, you can't mow a shrubbery. So somebody has to personally go in there and pull out the maples, oaks, poison ivy, Virginia creeper and everything else that wants to strangle the hedge.

Welcome to the NE forum, jwutzke. Nice to see someone moving north instead of the other way!

If by low maintenance you mean no clipping, but are willing to pull out vines and seedling maples a few times a year, there are lots of choices for a mixed hedgerow. You can obtain a list of natives from the New England Wildflower Society, as they sell many of these shrubs. The list of natives they'll have in spring is not posted on the NEWFS web site yet, but there's and email address for this, nursery@newenglandWILD.org.

MG's point is right, and, if by "absentee" you mean you won't be up here at all, then I agree you should wait to plant the hedgerow. If you're going to be there a few times a year, you'll need to take special precautions to prevent vines and seedling trees from overtaking the small shrubs, but I think it can be done with some help from temporary weed barriers (I've used long sheets of cardboard, and even long boards for this) and occasional hand weeding.

I can't comment on the maples, because my own experience is mostly with the weedy Norway maples (a totally different animal, I know) and that's made me detest maples in general. I DO remember that sugar maples are beautiful, I just can't forgive them for having such thugs in their family.

Your plan sounds really sensible to me. Engineering studies show that plants don't do much to mitigate the sound of traffic, but these tests are always flawed, IMHO. They don't take into account the sounds made BY and IN the hedgerow itself, from birds, twigs and leaves, and they don't consider how much the sense of enclosure provided by shrubs effects the perception of sound from the other side. I read (a long time ago, in the NY Times) that broadleaved evergreens placed as near as possible to the sound source work best, and that the wider the hedgerow the better.

You might want to combine deciduous and evergreen material, so you'll have winter interest as well as a good barrier. Sorry that I don't have specific suggestions, but I'm in zone 7 and we have a much different palette to work with here.

One plant you should definitely include is witch hazel - hamamellis x intermedia is my favorite (although it's not the native variety) because it blooms in February. If you've
been in New England in winter, you can imagine how nice it is to have flowers in February. The native Hamamelis virginiana blooms in fall to winter (Oct-Dec), which doesn't seem that useful to me (especially with your blazing sugar maples); the Ozark native (H. vernalis) blooms along with the x intermedia. None of these is especially dense, however, so they'd only be useful if you're designing a mixed planting.

Keep us posted, please!

Here is a link that might be useful: New England Wildflower Society

Thanks both of you. I'll look up those species. We will be able to visit a couple times during the summer, and I anticipate doing quite a bit of weed barrier / mulching at least this first year, so I'm cautiously optimistic. (I've also lived in New England before, so I know what I'm getting into weather-wise, though it sounds like you're getting hit particularly badly so far this year.)

The highway is not a busy one, so the primary goal for the hedge is being a visual barrier, but I think that anything in between the listener and the road also helps reduce noise. I know we used to live on a busy street with a hedge, and when the leaves were gone in the winter the street noise was noticably more intrusive.

Congratulations on your new land and commendations for thinking of your plantings at this point. What is currently growing on the land - bare cropland, mowed field, old field growing up, thicket or woods? Is it wet, dry, sandy or clay soil? I'm assuming it's acid, though there are parts of VT that are not. All these things will influence what will grow best.

The fact that the road is in a cut will help with reducing the sound, and the plants will enhance the sense of separation and background "natural" sounds to compete with the road noise. If you plant your hedgerow on a slight berm (depending on whether you want to truck in that much soil!) it will raise the height of the hedgerow and further reduce the noise level. You will want to be sure you plant with knowledge of the road right-of-way in mind so that if the town or state decides to work on the road, you don't lose what you've planted. Also, you may want to plant a double staggered row of shrubs to help block the road sooner and more completely. After you plant it (this also applies to the trees,) mulch well with cardboard or several layers of newspaper covered with bark mulch (not the nuggets and keep the mulch several inches from the trunk) and water it deeply if there are long periods without rain, and they will settle in and grow well. The mulch will retain moisture and reduce competition from other plants.

I had to giggle a bit at Digging's comment about flowers in February - oh the difference between zones 4 and 7! They do bloom earlier than most other plants here, but at least a month later than February. I have 3 varieties of witch hazel, a plant I love for its shape and bare branch structure in winter as well as for its flowers and scent. H. virginiana grows wild here, and if you have a plant that drops its leaves well (which by the way have a lovely clear yellow fall color) and a dark background like hemlocks, the yellow flowers stand out well and are a great part of the fall color. I wouldn't be without it! I planted H. vernalis (native to the US, but not to NH or VT) two seasons ago, and it blooms late March to mid April here, just north of Concord, NH. The flowers are tiny, but I'm hoping that as the plant gets larger, the overall effect of that many flowers all at once will have more impact than they currently do with the plant's current size of about 5' x 3'. I also bought H.x intermedia 'Diane' (non-native, but not at all invasive) a year and a half ago, and have had one spring with it. It is borderline hardy here, but I got a good deal on a large plant and decided to give it a try. It bloomed beautifully after last year's mild winter, and since it is totally covered in snow right now, I'm expecting another year of nice bloom unless it gets really cold after a total snow melt. It starts blooming late March and continues for most of the month of April. I took some photos on 3/30 last year, after an early warm spell when they had just started blooming. I'll upload a couple when I have some time near a high speed internet connection and let you see the differences.

Three native Viburnums occur in this area - V. dentatum, V. acerifolium, and V. cassinoides. All have berries and nice healthy looking foliage, and the last two have nice late pinky-red fall color. I have all 3, and the one I like best is cassinoides for its leaves, both summer and fall, berries, and its striking (tho short-lived) spring flowers in large white flat pannicles.

High bush blueberries have white spring flowers, summer fruit, and gorgeous red fall color. Some have nicely colored winter young twigs, either gold or red. Truly a plant for all seasons. You can plant named varieties or wild ones, depending on how much fruit you want.

Cornus alternifolia is a great small tree. Most of mine are multitrunked and like the Viburnums have great flowers, berries much loved by the birds (the tree off my back patio simply shivers with bird life in August as the berries ripen), bright red berry stems that persist after the birds strip the berries, nice fall color and a great winter silhouette. There are several red twigged dogwood shrubs that provide low-impact flowers and berries as well as winter color from the red twigs, especially if you cut some twigs back each year.

A couple of other (though some are non-native) plants you might want to consider to enhance the seasonal beauty and the thickness of your hedgerow and to help provide good nesting sites: forsythia (be sure to get a variety hardy enough to bloom in zone 4b) which untrimmed makes an arching, thick, twiggy shrub with early yellow blooms (branches are great for forcing) and provides well-protected nest sites as well a good play 'caves' if you have kids or grandkids, and some of the hardier mountain laurels (native) and evergreen rhodies like 'Roseum elegans' (non-native) or even some of the R. maximum varieties (native.) (A June visit to Rhododendron State Park in Fitzwilliam in the SW part of the state is in order once you move here!) They will provide year-round greenery and spring flowers, and if you plant them on the north side of the hedge (if you go for the double row of plants) they should be well enough protected from the winter sun and wind.

The sugar maple and beeches are a great choice, two of my favorite trees for shape and stature as well as fall color. Add a red maple or two and you will extend your fall color season by starting it earlier, followed by the sugar maple and ending with the beech. Be aware that the beech is a relatively slow-growing tree, so you will enjoy it, but it will be coming into its full glory long after you and I are both long gone; they are trees that are really planted for future generations as much as for our own. I must say that I am continually grateful to those people who planted trees along NH roads several generations ago that I am now able to appreciate.

The following link is to a "songbird hedge" page on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's website. A couple of their thoughts may need modification for your zone, but maybe you will like some of their suggestions, especially for berrying plants.
Good luck!
ML

Here is a link that might be useful: songbird hedge

Thanks nhbabs! Sounds like you and I are sympatico -- I was thinking (time and money allowing) of doing a staggered double row -- and I can't wait to get back to the land of rhododendrons (and lilacs, and peonies, etc!) Unfortunately the hedgerow is going to be fairly north-south trending, so it can't be rhodies, but... we do have a good bit of woods at the rear of the property, and I plan on thinning out a couple areas just a touch and putting in some rhodies around a small swampy area.

Was interested to see your suggestion of high bush blueberries -- do you think they'd grow dense enough to be a visual screen? Most blueberry bushes I see seem a bit sparse. But they do have great fall color, as well as berries that both humans and animals can enjoy. We had one small potted bush for years -- it even made it through one Phoenix summer before succombing -- and it's amazing how many berries you can get off just one small bush; I can't imagine how many pancake breakfasts we could host with a whole hedgerow of them!

Finally as for planting for the future -- yes indeed, unless we start at the age of 5 or 10, much of what we do won't reach its full glory til we're fertilyzer ourselves. I take some pleasure in that, but also let it encourage me to "plant responsibly" -- natives, non-invasives, logical locations, etc.

I'm not sure of the soil type per se; before I head out in May I'll have a friend dig up a couple samples and see what he finds. But overall the site is sloping down towards the road cut (about a 1-in-10 slope, not too steep), and a few hundred feet up the hill from the road there's a swampy area and stream, leading to a small pond. So I'm thinking that the area should have a pretty high water table and, between that and the slope leading down to it, be pretty decently moistened.

Right now it's abandoned farmland; it's been cut regularly but not for hay, and some of it's starting to go to thickets of god-knows-what. In fact the irony of our May trip is that we'll probably be taking out as many trees and bushes as we plant -- just in different places!

Definitely have a pH test done. North of the terminal moraine, the soil is no longer predictibly acidic. The peonies and lilacs like lime, but the rhododendrons and blueberries don't.

By observation, it seems to me that around here to keep a field brush free, it has to be mowed at least once a month. That tends to really freak out people who have dreams of nice prairie wildflower collections, who haven't quite figured out that they live in the woods, even if they don't have any trees.

Mad Gallica - Here we don't need monthly mowing - we mow our fields 3 times a year, maybe 4, depending on how wet the year is.

Jwutzke - Most of my suggestions were made thinking of a mixed hedgerow, so I wouldn't plant an entire blueberry hedge and expect it to be good screening, but with a double row, if you plant it next to something thicker, it would be a nice part of the hedge. Likewise for the viburnums, dogwoods, and hamamelis; with the exception of the forsythia, most deciduous shrubs that grow around here may not be thick enough on their own to make a good screen, but a double row with some of the plants being evergreens, I would expect that it would add to the overall effect. It may also depend on the type of blueberry - I know my inlaws' patch, which has many different varieties, has varied growth patterns among the bushes.

Did some web research -- the H. vernalis and V. cassinoides both sound nice. What do you think about Euonymus atropurpurea, Eastern wahoo, and Lindra benzoin, Spicebush? I don't know if I'd ever even heard of the Eastern wahoo before, but it sounds really interesting. I also like Prunus x cistena, though it may get a bit big for the sort of hedge I was picturing.

Lindera grows wild around here, an understory shrub in young forests. I've never seen one growing either as a specimen shrub, or even in full sun. A couple of years ago, I ordered a bunch of seedlings from Musser Forests for the swamp, but they are still pretty small. Something to keep in mind is that lindera is dioceious, like winterberry, and sexed seedlings are impossible to find.

nhbabs, given the length of the growing season, how often does 3 or 4 times a year translate into? The point I was trying to make is that a lot of the 'wildflower meadow' people claim a meadow only has to be mowed about once a year because they are assuming a certain amount of natural cooperation. So people go into this with the idea that the maintenance can be done by hiring a guy with a bushhog once a year.

Mad Gallica -

3 or 4 times is every 6-8 weeks, and we were pushing back old field growth: white pines, staghorn sumac, cherries, and poison ivy. Now the mowing is done mostly to keep the grass from lying flat, which it does if we let it go too long. Hiring a guy with a brush hog twice a year would do it for maintaining a field with no shrubbery. There are parts of our field that only get mown once or twice a year, depending on rate of growth, whether it's too wet to mow in rainy years, etc. Along the interstates, the state of NH only mows once a year in their wildflower patches, usually in August or early September, so that they go to seed. In starting the wildflower patches, they removed the grass, planted the wildflowers in mats of mulch, and just let it go. There are signs specifically alerting their mowers to avoid the wildflower patches. At the same time, I agree that marketers of wildflower seed mixes don't make it clear that simply scattering the seed in an area that already has plants or weed seeds is an exercise in futility.

Lindera doesn't grow wild in many areas of NH. It's mostly found in the southern part of the state and towards the coast, but I haven't seen it anywhere, so I have a feeling that we are towards the northern edge of its range and it's uncommon. I bought two last year, and I'll see how they have come through the winter when the snow melts. Currently they are completely buried.

were I trying to block traffic sound/visuals in vt., I would go a solid fast growing evergreen hedge. two choices of plants fit that goal- hemlocks or thuja. in ma., woolly adelgid is a major hemlock destroyer but i don't know if they are coming to vt or perhaps never coming to vt because of your winters. if the latter is the case, i would plant hemlocks in a heartbeat. they are cheap and if you buy a lot of them i think you'd be able to get a discount. i would plant them on 3 or 4 foot centers.if woolly adelgid IS a problem there, then go for Thuja Smargd/ Emerald Green.
while i am all for foliage color and diversity, i personally would plant all one plant type. think of it as the picture frame that shows off what's in front of it.

i don't know how far your primary viewing place is- to this hedge, but you might want to consider planting things in front of it that will be detectable from distance. variegated or yellow foliage shrubs.

Good thoughts arbo. One original idea had been much like that, a row of evergreens in back, closest to the road, and then a row either of maples or alternating maples and beeches (red and yellow in fall). Based on some of the comments I've received, though, along with my interest in providing some habitat, food sources, etc., I'm starting to think about a "random" mix of shrubs, from low ground covers to short trees. I've got enough room that I was thinking that I could do a fairly thick planting; granted in the winter it still wouldn't provide any visual screening but the critters would like it.

I suppose I could do a row of evergreens closest to the road and then the shrubs in front of that (from the perspective of the house).

I'll probably pop back on line in a week or so with a list of shrubs and short trees to see if people have any specific pro or con reactions.

I recently picked up an interesting book, The Authenic Garden, Five Principles for Cultivating a Sense of Place. Since a big part of the attraction of your new property is its location in Vermont, you might want to think about either natives or plants that seem especially suited to that part of the world.

I'm having some trouble identifying the "sense of place" for my small, haphazard, in-town Cape Cod garden, but I'd imagine a large property in Vermont would have a more readily identifiable personality that you'd want to build upon. Plant choices make all the difference, and I envy you for the fact that you've got an opportunity for a fresh start in a new garden.

Here in NH it has become almost impossible to purchase hemlocks because the nursery stock has to be quarantined for long periods of time due to the wooly adelgid.
I bought five, six foot hemlocks a few years ago that turned out to be part of a shipment that contained one tree with adelgids. State of NH sawed these trees down from my property and hauled them away. Good thing they did, as my property is half native hemlock!
Hemlocks are fast growers,so now we dig them in early spring for transplanting elsewhere.

I frequently drive across Vermont and see dense areas of native eastern white pine.
I planted several dozen 6 foot white pine from Northern Nurseries in WRJ five years ago and they have already doubled in size.

So, observe what native evergreens and shrubs are growing on or near your property. You might need a guidebook or help from the local nurseries.

In addition to white pine,I have planted: 'red flame' red maples, amelanchiers,ninebark,birch,spruce, fir, crabapples,blueberries,viburnum,red twig dogwood,lilacs and winterberry(ilex).
(deer will browse small crabapples and birch)

Thanks digging, I may have to look up that book. A few weeks ago I purchased "Native Plants of the Northeast", and it's becoming my bible. I do intend to plant virtually all native, with certain flowerbed exceptions right around the future home (e.g., peonies, which I have to have). As "Native Plants..." notes there are so many good natives it's hard to understand why we import virtually identical (or inferior) species from Asia or Europe!

Interesting to hear about the adelgid up in NH. We have some hemlock on the property that looked fine now but I'm not inclined to risk planting them now and having to cut them down (or have them die) in 5 or 10 years, just when they're getting good size. For evergreens I was thinking eastern white pine and/or balsam fir, depending on sun conditions.

We have some good friends just outside of Essex Junction, VT. We're visiting them this weekend.

They have a hedgerow of white pines closest to the road, then some maples, then in front of the maples a mix of shrubs. They have some big beautiful high bush blueberries, that are quite dense.

They live on a two lane road. The only caution is to plant them back from the road enough to prevent loss from road salt. They did lose a couple trees as I guess VT uses quite a bit of salt during their long snowy winters.

We have a home in McIndoe Falls, VT (exit 18, I-91 and 10 miles south of St Jay)

We front Rt 5 and on the property that is not in front of the house we planted old-fashion purple lilacs. We have a collection of about 40 different lilacs but it was recommended that this close to the road we use the old-fashion lilac.

A hedgerow of three staggered rows of various conifers was planted on the south boundary to screen a neighbor out and to provide a wind break in winter. Behind this on the property line we erected a split 3 rail fence so it looks great from both sides and enhances the neighbor's property as well as our own.

as we have a small lot (.6 acres) we have had to become creative.. and we planted apple trees ( 2 each of 16 varieties) close and in two parallel rows, grafting the rows together in an arch to form an apple arbor.. a garden archetectural feature that leads from one "room" to another as we landscape. (Williamsburg has one and it is pictured in the Williamsburg Gardens book)

any.. much more fruit started, tree and bush.. we too are absentee at this point but get over 2 days a week and several weeks a year as we work on the place.

Good luck with your Vermont property..where are you located??

I'm wondering if the original Author is still a member and whatever happened to her hedgerow planting?