The bark doesn't peel and is more characteristic of cherry. Yes, and actually, I may take that back - you can see some points on the end of a few serrations on some of those lvs and the seeds are more like Zelkova serrata now that I spend (too much) time on it. Looking up in the crown too we see the typical limb crowding and a more characteristic hanging of the lvs. Bark isn't typical of zelkova either, though. Dang Ulmaceae and their lvs, you must look at many. Gardenweb: where productivity goes to die, despite my best efforts. Dan

How come nobody has answered this yet?! While it may seem harmless to add only 3-4" of soil, it really is a bad idea. For one, you don't want any roots to grow upwards. Second of all, flowers planted in the root zone are going to compete with the tree for water and nutrients. And they're going to lose. So don't bother. Keep a nice open soil area for the trees, as stress free as you can make it with no nearby digging. So to answer your question, yes you should definitely be concerned with harming the trees and to limit that harm you should build your planters somewhere else. I challenge you to find one professionally designed landscape that includes flowers in the root zone of trees. You're not going to find it.

Any evergreen, zone-appropriate native groundcover would be a nice neutral choice. I think your yard plans sound very pretty!

As a reminder, here's our proposed layout; blue dots mark the edges of the screening area. I want to screen the view from neighbor #1 into the front of our house and from neighbor #2 into the side windows where our kitchen/dining/living room are (represented by green arrows.) I guess my primary question is... If we reduced the (half tear drop shaped) planting bed depth from 20 feet to a 10'-15' deep half ellipse shaped bed, will we have enough room for a beautiful screening planting including a few boulders? Our kids love climbing on a neighbors boulder and I thought it would be nice to have a few in this bed positioned as seating to hang out and see the mountain view. Okay. Here's the view from our neighbors front porch with the edges of the proposed screening area marked with blue lines. Their living room, dining room and kitchen sink window look directly to the front of our house. Left to right is our master bedroom window - mudroom window - half lite front door - kitchen sink window. Here's the view from the proposed new driveway approach. Our current approach crosses the neighbors property a bit, so we have to shift the right side of the driveway to the left in addition to widening it for two car widths. I'd like some screening for these side windows because I think if you look out the windows of the little white house, you can see right into our kitchen/dining/living room and I'd like some privacy screening. We have a beautiful view out those side windows, so I don't like having them covered, but I have a four year old streaker so... Here is the view from our front door to the left, center and right. The blue lines represent the blue dots on the above drawing. I'd really like to look out the kitchen window or the front door and see plants and birds and have no awareness of what my neighbors across the street are doing. It's awkward for me to be working at the sink and see into their house or notice whether they're home or not; I can't help but see, but I really don't want to.