Articles: Cedar Slats – The Modern Garden Screen

As a modern, vibrant garden screening, Cedar slats are brilliant. The amount of natural colour variation that cedar has, particularly in Canadian species, is remarkable and will bring your garden to life.

These screens are becoming a popular choice as a replacement for the traditional fence panel. the slats are fitted horizontally (You can fit vertically if required) with a gap in between which allows sunlight through. Unlike cladding, Cedar slats are provided planed all round and aren’t machined into a profile.

We can provide slats in the following lengths:

• 0.61m
• 0.915m
• 1.22m
• 1.52m
• 1.83m
• 2.13m
• 2.44m
• 2.74m
• 3.05m
• 3.35m
• 3.66m
• 3.96m
• 4.27m

If you can’t cut your slats down to the lengths you need you will need to look at entering your cutting list into the pricing grid on our western red cedar planed all round page.

We recommend that you treat your slats to protect them from turning silvery grey. By treating them to protect against UV light you will preserve their colour and wow factor.

Installing Cedar Slats

When installing Cedar slats, you will need to have battens in place to fix your slats to (These battens are usually fixed to posts at either end of each panel of the screen). Then predrill your slats to help avoid splitting the wood and hold them in place with a washer. To evenly space out the boards use a 5mm or 10mm spacer (Your choice depending how much sunlight you want to come through the screen).

What species are available?

We supply the slats in both Canadian and British Western Red Cedar. The Canadian is a darker red colour variation with very few knots whereas the British is a paler red but has a higher knot content. Both are great for outdoor use however the Canadian Cedar is a lot more stable because it isn’t subject to as much water movement.