Cotoneaster. It'll grow just tall enough that the leaves should be easily blown to the ground or the rain will take it down. It blooms in the spring and can be covered with red berries in the fall. Until then, use the leaves themselves as mulch. There's no reason to remove leaves only to replace it with shredded pallets.

I was thinking with the oak leaves (which seem to take forever to finish falling)they just won't stay put. They're in the driveway, on the sidewalks etc. The wind blows them everywhere and stiffer winds pile up the leaves.
Oak leaves also leach out a tannin as they eventually break down so you have to get rid of them some way.

Just wondering if there is some sort of nylon mesh(thin,unnoticeable) you can lay over the original mulch so when the leaves fall you can blow them off with a leafblower?
What I did at one house with a difficult area was lay down medium/fine broken brick. It was a hillside so it was the one thing that would stay put and heavy so it wouldn't move when the leafblower was used on the leaves(still had to be careful and not point the blower straight down).
Found if you made the brick too shallow you'd walk the pieces into the undersoil.
I liked it for a long time because it was permeable and absorbed less of the rain (during a drought) than pinebark or other natural mulches you had to replace annually.
Just a thought.

Oak leaves also leach out a tannin as they eventually break down so you have to get rid of them some way.

Are you saying that people should get rid of their fallen oak leaves?

I've got a kinda same situation here. My front yards (narrow strips of dirt each side of the driveway/parking pad) with just perennials & shrubs/trees and hardscaping - entry patio & a cute little circle thingie done w/stone. No grass and very tight. I wondered the same thing, early on .... then realized that leaves falling added to the rotted leaf mulch already in place. Left them and it worked for a few years, but then my trees matured (as did my neighbors' trees - grrrr) and now I have LOTS of leaves - what to do?

Granted, I don't have and know nothing about pin oak, (is that bad??), but cleaning up my front yard is now necessary, if only for esthetics. So, I use a low power electic leaf blower to direct the fallen leaves onto the driveway where they're more easily scooped up. If I do this when the leaves are semi-dry and the mulch still sodden, it works. Beyond that, I do have a child sized, mini bamboo rake and use that to pull leaves from beneath shrubs into the path of the gentle blower.

My back yard is tightly fenced, same no grass zone w/shrubs & perennials. Lots of leaves back there too, but the fence serves as a great wall against which I blow all the leaves off the stone walks. Then they become mulch. Win-win!

Just a query - what do you mean when you say 'mulch'? I've only dealt w/rotted leaf mulch, not bagged stuff. My mulch quickly breaks down to soil and is replentished every year. I ask only 'cuz a neighbor put down some sort of chunky woody type stuff, and years later it's still sitting atop the soil. Just wondering ......

Anyway, hope this helps :o)

No, esh. What I was trying to describe to sabazel is that oak leaves, because they take so much longer to decompose, if left whole(unshredded) will simply blow around and away from where you use them as mulch.
One thing I've really preferred oakleaves for is for filling and insulation to shrubs after installing the burlap around the shrub.
That's what we had to do up North for certain shrubs and the stiff oakleaves were a good windblock inside the burlap barriers.