Best Defensive Plants To Place Around Your Borders

For centuries, spiny shrubs and trees have been used as defensive barriers, either as hedging to open livestock or climbing plants on the wall to avoid vandalism or graffiti. People use plants to increase the security of their homes and properties by using the plant’s ability to propagate.

Getting your house professionally groomed or choosing the appropriate landscape that could help keep intruders away can help protect your home. A secured home could convey that someone could not enter your house quickly and provide intruders with second thoughts about their motives.

Top Defensive Plants For Your Borders

1. Blackberry

Due to its fast growth rate and thorns covering every inch of this plant, you can have the ideal protective barrier. Nobody would dare go through a blackberry patch. Blackberries are planted away from your house because of their disheveled appearance, but they effectively keep people out.

Blackberries are just one of many plants and shrubs you could purchase at the nearest plant store in your area, which could help you add security to your house. You can buy other types of defensive plants online or apply for a credit card from Sofi to easily purchase the defensive plants you want for your home.

2. Bougainvillea

Bougainvillea has bright, papery blossoms and exceedingly terrible thorns. Tropical vines can be used as a low-maintenance ground cover or as a decorative accent for walls or arbors. They’d be ideal for growing along a fence to discourage humans or animals from attempting to climb it.

3. Crown of Thorns

The crown of thorns is derived from where Jesus wore a crown of thorns when he was crucified. It is also known as the Christ plant or Christ thorn.

Crown of thorns, with an average fully grown height of six feet, is ideal for use along borders and boundaries where a clear field of sight is not needed. Plant this under windows if you want to trim it to shape, or don’t mind having it covered. 

Hedging plants provide privacy and security to your properties. It could cover your home from the outside so you can move freely inside without everybody passing by your house knowing everything you do. 

4. Agarita (Mahonia trifoliata)

Only some plants use thorns as a defensive strategy against invaders. Sharp-tipped leaves are the preferred weapon of shrubs such as Agarita plants. But these plants have much more to offer than improving home security. Its thick branches and spiky edges attract songbirds looking for predator-free plants to dwell in.

From late February to early April, little golden flowers appear. If you endure the thorny scrub, this evergreen plant bears tasty red berries from April to May.

5. Hardy Orange

This protective plant’s thick, twisting branches come with large, pointed spikes. It may grow to 20 feet tall but can be routinely clipped into a hedge, ready to stab anybody attempting to climb or squeeze through.

The ‘Flying Dragon,’ a lesser variant, develops to be five feet tall. With careful trimming, with this, you may create an impenetrable hedge. It loses its leaves in the winter but retains green branches and stems with many spikes. Hardy orange makes an excellent perimeter plant and cattle fence.

6. Common Sea Buckthorn

Sea Buckthorn grows by the seaside, as its names imply. The shrub has long, silvery green leaves and yellowish-green blooms in the early spring. Its branches are covered with sharp thorns, making it an ideal hedge plant.

The Bottom Line

Planting defensive plants could increase the security of your property. It may not provide total defense from intruders, but it could give them second thoughts before entering your premises. Hedges could also offer privacy to your house and properties.

Although it takes time and patience before the plants can serve their purpose, it takes months or even years for hedges to be at full height to offer privacy. It takes a lot of pruning to ensure that your defensive plants can do their job in the future.