Decorative screens can create a dramatic visual impact when used in a garden setting, making it more inviting, more interesting, more physically comfortable, and more exotic, depending upon the style and how it is installed. Beautiful designs evoke emotional responses in us, and every design has it’s own unique character, evoking a different feeling within us,  just like the design of a particular style of garden, from modern and tightly manicured Zen garden to a luscious lavender and wisteria-overflowing English cottage style. A well-matched screen and garden can harmoniously create a truly luxurious garden space that you never want to leave on those days when the weather is a kind and accommodating host.

Here are 10 creative ways you can add a decorative garden to screen to your home garden, starting from the rather common ways many of us already know, to a few that perhaps haven’t occurred to you, and just might be the answer to an eye-sore or issue you may have with your outdoor space.

1. Create Privacy From Those Nosy Neighbors

One of the most obvious uses of a decorative screen is as a shield from prying eyes. To be able to have a smoke in private, eat a big weekend breakfasts with your partner in your bathrobes, BBQ with your mates and consume a slight overabundance of alcohol, or simply to be downright silly while playing with your pets or children. You need privacy to feel relaxed, comfortable, and to enjoy your garden to its full potential. Decorative screens can offer this, in various percentages of block-out to suit your needs.

2. Prevent Skin Cancer

Nobody needs the full hellishly scorching rays of the Australian summer sun on their skin for more than a few minutes at a time. If you don’t have any shield from the sun in your garden, you risk the frying up of all your hard yard work and the cell-imploding cancerous aftermath of an unnaturally ozone-depleted sun on those few but unforgettably-apocalyptic hot days we must endure each year. Get a decorative screen and protect yourself and your precious greenery.

3. Raise the Height of Your Fence from Hobbit to Elven

Adding decorative screens across the top of an existing fence is a great way to increase the privacy of your garden when what you have just doesn’t quite make you comfortable enough. Perhaps a new development in your neighborhood now aligns a view of your garden with a neighbor’s window, or the trellis work atop your fence is rotting and got partially destroyed by an overweight possum. Decorative screens are a cheaper answer to the problem than having to install an entirely new fence.

4.  Create Enchanting or Forbidding Gateways

The inviting charm of a decorative screen installed as a gate door with a bucolic garden setting behind it is irresistibly motivating for a green thumb, and a large metal gate with a bold design on it is intimidating to an intruder. Gates set the mood for what kind of garden you enclose, and decorative screens can really make this a clear statement. They will also deter thieves, stray dogs, juvenile delinquents, and angry ex-partners from accessing your private property, conveniently.

5. Grow Your Garden Up

When your little patch of land is overflowing with plants but you would like to continue planting, use the space of your garden wall enclosure to grow your garden vertically! This is an especially popular way to have a larger garden if you live in an urban area with limited outdoor space. Decorative screens placed in strategic positions can keep each wall ‘patch’ separate while beautifully decorating the spaces in between. We love the green walls at Pap’s Vertical Gardens, a QAQ screen distributor in Caulfield, Victoria.

6. Make Your Garden Walls Less Boring

As outdoor decorative art, nothing beats a beautiful screen design placed along a wood fence, rendered walls, bricks walls, or any other large surface that would otherwise go bare and be boring. All QAQ screen designs can be cut in a variety of materials to suit the outdoors, and some, such as aluminium composite material (ACM), can be powder-coated in a number of colors. But the creative aspect does not stop there! You can create your own design, become the artist, and have your own custom screen made up to exactly suit the dream wall art you’ve always wanted.

7. Replace a Pen or Shed Door

Often shed or pen doors are haphazard, dilapidated affairs put together by somebody’s half-blind grandpa, with rusty hinges and bolts that never meet the latches evenly, and rotting wood. Replace those doors with lightweight decorative screens! They will give the old shed or pen a face lift, let more light into that unlit shed, and best of all, they cost a lot less than a heavy wooden door.

8. Create Sunlit Shelving

Raise pot plants and gardening gear off the floor and organize your possessions with shelving created from decorative screens. The advantage over a solid shelving unit is that a decorative screen will allow sunlight to flow through the spaces, keeping any plant life underneath alive and thriving. Screens can be made in metal or wood in any custom size for installation in any size nook or cranny.

9. Build a Pergola

With a number of screens, you could create an island oasis in a larger backyard. There’s no need to start from scratch either; you could buy the basic wooden frame of a pergola and clad it with decorative screens to create more shade or privacy. If you have an event planned, such a wedding, you could have the entire thing designed and painted exactly to your taste.

10.  Decorate Porch Railings & Built-In Furnishings

Decorative screens can be nailed along the bottom or backside of porch benches or even made into table tops, cabinet doors, or along the porch railing. Not only do screens beautify the otherwise boring wooden porch, they are especially useful to keep young kids from squeezing their heads through porch railings!

So there you have it! 10 creative uses for QAQ screens you might not have previously known.

If you can think of any creative ways you’ve seen decorative screens used, tell me how in the comments section!