Japanese maples come up in gardens here but seldom in the woods, as our summers are dry. Any kind of tree with orange or red fall color may be yellow in full shade. Silver maples here often have a mix of colors that can be quite nice, streaks or sections of purple, red, maybe orange and yellow. Green Norway maples growing in the open here often have quite a bit of orange and red on the outside; there is a grafted cultivar seen in plantings here that is consistently all yellow in fall. A larger solitary Norway maple in a northwest WA community actually blazes in fall. A friend who grew up in Illinois said there was a Norway maple and a sugar maple nearby, these behaved as though trading off which one was conspicuous in a given fall. Recently volunteers have started clearing Norway maple saplings out of a wooded ravine in a Seattle park. The numbers of these that were becoming established was positively frightening. Elsewhere here it is not usual in my experience to see such intense infestation - so far. I do know of a drier evergreen forest park site north of Seattle where too many have been coming up, but nothing like in the one moister, probably more fertile location. During one segment in a fictional cop TV show I've watched the detectives go out to a local wooded site to look at a crime scene. It was during a time when the trees where not in leaf, as far as I could see just about every tree, small and larger was a Norway maple.

You know all those spectacular tropicals y'all grow in pots? Elephant Ears are an absolute plague here in the Deep South. I paid eight whole dollars for Illustris, and it took five years of extremely dedicated work to get rid of it. I laid the dug out plants on my driveway and let them cook in the (southern) sun so they'd die....everytime it rained, they'd revive. I finally bagged them up and sent them to the dump. Then there are River fern, aka Thelypteris kunthii (free plants...do your homework before planting!), yellow flag iris (the seeds are viable forever, but the seedlings are easy to pull young. good thing.), Goldsturm rudbeckia (yes, they seed for years after the plants are gone), and OBEDIENT plant (ha!). Here's one that I am keeping a watchful eye on: Puple Loropetalum. If you damage a root while working in your bed, you get a sucker immediately. Man, I hope these aren't going to be problematic. They're my favorite purple foliage plants for our area.

Reading these postings just cracked me up! Two pwoplw on this site steered me to the right identification of GOUMI tree. GOUMI in Japanese means garbage! Our local gomi-baba is the lady who spies on everyone's garbage when we leave it at the central dropping point, then goes to your house to scold you if you left the wrong type on the wrong day. (Plastic bottles left on unburnable-plastics day-every other moMonday as opposed to pkplastic bottle day on Wednesdays. Goumi bush-I love it! I will have to check with our local garden shop this spring to see if they carry it.

All your comments and advice are terrific. I'm not involving the police on this one. I have involved them before though. A "neighbor" (such a benign word for a family of human miscreants) decided he could cut branches off my trees and dig up plants hanging over my backyard fence. He believed in his tiny brain that he had a property right to do so. Behind my house we have a large public alley, basically a road. He lives across the road and he and his dad clean all organic matter out of their gravel with a tweezer. Of course, my yard is an affront to their sterile GRAVEL-WORLD. After he cut branches the first time, I got him to agree to not do it again without my permission. Of course, he couldn't help himself, because the voices in his head kept telling him to cut. That's when the police told him to stop or they'd arrest him. They told him what he thought was his right was only in his imagination, not actual law. After I worked for several years to get chicanes (2 half traffic circles) installed on our street to slow traffic, I was labeled a property rights thief by a psychotic neighbor. She convinced the neighborhood drunk and others that I had violated his property rights. Even though most neighbors liked having the chicane, the evil-doers (Rumsfeld would have called them "a group of dead-enders")vandalaized the chicanes, my property, and even took the lug nuts off one of my car wheels (under cover of darkness). Anyhow, I lived here in a hostile environment for about 4 years. yes, that's how long the anti-chicane activists persisted. Their evilness and inability to get their way ate away at them and they all moved away. It's now really quiet and nice here. So, this cherry thing is small potatoes. A couple days after this cherry incident, a man was killed in an altercation around his caring for plants in a traffic circle.