Although home burglaries are trending downward overall, there are still more than 800,000 break-ins every year. Aside from the potential damage to your property and the loss of your belongings, there also the concern for your family’s safety—no one wants criminals wandering around your house.
The obvious solution is to go with technology—alarm systems and security cameras. While these kinds of systems can definitely help defend against unwanted guests on your property (and give you peace of mind), there’s more you can do to keep your home secure. Your landscaping is a surprisingly key element of your home’s security—or it can be, if you plan it thoughtfully. Here are a few simple ways your home’s exterior design can help defend it against intruders.
Keep your home’s entrances visible
The first thing to consider when it comes to security and landscaping is visibility. A lot of tall, lush plants can give you a feeling of cozy privacy—but it also offers a lot of places for people to conceal themselves. Trimming hedges, shrubs, and other plantings down to about 2 to 3 feet in height will ensure you have a good field of vision around your property, and can help eliminate those hiding spots and make it easier to actually use those security cameras you paid for.
Having a lot of plants around windows and doors can give you a lot of privacy and shade, but it also means someone can get up close to your house to work on your door and window locks without being seen from the street. Your neighbors can’t help you if they can’t see what’s happening. And dense landscaping around your front door means someone can conceal themselves in order to wait for you to come home or open the door.
To make your windows and entryway more secure, keep them clear. If you’re using defensive plants, keep them trimmed low and set them back from windows and doors. You should be able to see the area immediately around your apertures easily from a variety of angles.
You can also increase visibility by avoiding opaque features like walls or fences, and instead going with see-through choices like picket or chain-link fences or lattices.
Choose thorny plants
One way to weaponize your landscaping against trespassers is to place “defensive” plants around access areas like first-floor windows. Thorny, prickly plants placed thickly around these areas create a natural barrier to anyone trying to creep around your house. It might not have the same visceral excitement as releasing a bunch of hounds, but it will definitely make a trespasser think twice as they nurse their wounds.
Some examples of good defensive plants include cacti (including some mild-weather species like Prickly Pear), thorny rose bushes, Whale’s Tongue agave, or spiky plants like Barberry. Whatever climate or design you’re working with, there’s a plant that will make life uncomfortable for anyone trying to get close to your house.
Trim back your trees
If you’ve got trees as part of your landscaping, you should keep them away from your house (about 8 to 20 feet, depending on the size of the tree) for a lot of very good reasons (root issues with your foundation or roof damage, for example). But if your trees are closer than that, or if they’re mature and their branches have crept closer to the house, you should hire an arborist to cut them back. Trim both horizontally (so no one can shimmy their way to a window or to get on your roof) and vertically (so there are no branches lower than seven feet or so off the ground) to prevent someone from climbing up. Untrimmed trees can provide hiding places or act as ladders for thieves and other intruders, so trimming them regularly is a very good idea.
Skip the trellis
You might like the visual of a climbing plant snaking its way up your home’s walls, but if that includes a trellis or lattice you should reconsider. A trellis or lattice attached to an exterior wall (or leaned up against it) is essentially a ladder that someone can use to climb, gaining access to an upper floor window.
Use gravel for ground cover
One way your landscaping can increase your home’s security is by making it more challenging for intruders to sneak around. Rough gravel used as a ground cover around access points like windows will be noisy when walked on, making it a lot more difficult for someone to get close without being noticed. It’s not going to be as effective as an alarm system, of course, but in the dead of night an unusual noise might alert you—or your dog—to the presence of an unwanted guest outside.
Add lighting
One of the more obvious ways your landscaping plan can improve your home’s security is by adding a lot of lighting, especially motion-activated lights. Being able to see your outdoor spaces clearly makes it less likely someone can gain access to your property undetected, and a sudden flood of light will deter trespassers hoping for the cover of darkness. When planning your landscaping, make sure to include robust lighting to make it as safe and secure as possible.
