Hedges have the advantage of being cheap and imparting a mature feel to the garden, but they take a while to grow (so you'll need a temporary fence) and have the bad habit of continuing to grow outwards and upwards beyond their required proportions. This means that you'll have an annual trimming chore.

The cheapest hedging plant is hawthorn, which establishes well from bare-rooted transplants. Field-grown hedging plants such as these must be planted during the plant's dormant season ie late autumn and winter, when there's no green growth. Late summer or early autumn is an ideal time to make plans and order the plants, so that you can get them in before the ground becomes too wet, or worse still, freezes. If regularly trimmed, a hawthorn hedge offers a dense prickly stockproof and intruder-proof barrier.

Evergreen hedging is attractive all year, and will provide a dense screen if trimmed correctly. Pot-grown Leyland conifers, which can be planted at any time, are also fairly cheap, as are bare-rooted Leyland, Lawson cypress, and Western red cedar conifers. But these should be planted in autumn or spring, when there's plenty of moisture in the ground and a respite from strong winds. As an insurance measure, erect a temporary fence windbreak around them until they've become established.