How To Protect Your Garden From Vandalism 2019 Guide
You must have spent countless hours to make your garden beautiful enough to suit your lifestyle. As such, the last thing you need is for someone to vandalize your garden and your equipment maliciously. Gardeners spend billions of dollars every year to maintain the greenery in their gardens. So, if someone vandalizes your garden, it is not the flowers and plants that will suffer, but your bank and your time will also experience a blow.
What do you need to protect?
Exotic and specialists flowers, trees, and plants need more protection. If you specialize in exotic flowers, a vandal might want to destroy the plants out of sheer jealousy. Pots, planters, hanging baskets, and plush garden furniture also need protection from vandals and thieves. Again, you need to protect fountains, water features, fish (especially Koi Carp), mowers, and other garden tools and equipment.
To keep your garden protected from vandals and thieves, consider:
Beefing Up Security around Your Perimeter
Without a secure perimeter, anyone passing by your home can vandalize your garden. Your boundary walls and your fences need beefing up to keep vandals and burglars away.
Anti-Climb Products
For starters, choose anti-climb products and fit them on walls, gates, and fences. This will ensure that vandals (who can be people or animals) cannot climb into your garden. You can consider wall and fence spikes, anti-climb paint, and roller barriers. However, it is essential to note that some locations do not allow some anti-climb products to be used. Talk to your local planning department to know which products to use.
Good Locks on Gates
You need a quality padlock or a chain hasp set to keep the gate locked. To ensure that your gate’s cross braces do not aid the vandal to climb, use a solid panel on the outside of your gate. This will ensure vandals do not get a foothold.
Defensive Plants
Thorny shrubs will keep intruders away from your garden. If a vandal climbs over your garden, thorny shrubs such as Berberis and Pyracantha will ensure an uncomfortable landing for intruders. These plants need to be planted all round your perimeter. Talk to your local garden center to find out which plants are ideal for garden protection.
Keep Your Home Lit and Install Cameras
It is not easy for vandals to come to your home at night if your home is well lit. Most animals that might vandalize your garden are nocturnal and they will stay away from a well-lit yard. Again, people will stay away from a well-lit garden in fear that they will be seen. There is no place for vandals to hide in your garden if every area is lit. Garden lights do not have to stay on all night. Instead of lighting up your garden all night long, buy lights that go on when motion is detected and position them strategically in different parts of your garden. This way, an intruder gets into your garden, and the lights go on.
Security cameras can be monitored whether in person or online. When you install cameras, you can monitor what happens in your garden when you are not around. If you note animals are the ones vandalizing your garden, you will find a way to exterminate them. People will fear any home that has security cameras in fear that they will be spotted and reported to the authorities.
Besides cameras, you need to have a sound alarm system for your garden. The alarm system in your home keeps valuables inside your house protected. However, if you feel your plants are worth a small fortune, you need to keep them protected too, by installing an alarm system.
Bring Down Hiding Places
Are there bushes around your garden where animal vandals can hide? If there are, you need to clear these bushes. Again, if there are structures in your garden that serve no purpose but can hide vandals, you need to remove them or keep them lit enough to scare away vandals.
Protecting Your Equipment, Planters, and Ornaments
You need to keep your garden tools and equipment securely locked away. Your garden statuary and ornaments need to be secured to a land anchor. A land anchor is a chain or barbed device hammered into the ground and where a steel cable is attached to secure your planters and ornaments.
If you have a store for your garden equipment, keep the windows obscured so intruders cannot see what is inside. Even better, you need to mark your property with a UV marker pen or identifiable color. Vandals who may decide to steal your property will be deterred by the presence of recognizable color or marking.
Conclusion
If your garden is vandalized more than once, you need to report to the police. To do that, you need to photograph your garden often to have photos of before and after vandalism. Again, you also need to join the neighborhood watch scheme – which exists in some neighborhood – where you watch out for each other’s property. When you are growing expensive exotic and specialist plants, you need to ensure that your home insurance can cover the loss of these plants to vandalism. Most insurance policies will not cover garden structures and plants, but you can find a plan that does.
Written in association with J. Stevens
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