Oh of course not...my DW is the greatest and she is always cooperative with all my ideas!! (gotta throw that in just in case she drops in on the forum). I am not sure how I would deal with landscape or decorating from an ex...that would be tough. In general the garden is my territory, and that is probably for the best. I don't have free reign but I make most of the decisions because I do most of the work and it is my passion. In our house it is I that wants to plant flowers and she is the one trying to protect the lawn. ;-) We do quite a bit of home improvement and we have learned that it is best if once a person starts a project then that person finishes a project. We don't seem to work well together...it seems like we used to...but we are both perfectionists in different ways. BTW, I heard a joke recently that unfortunately seems to fit too often: "My wife and I have a system of compromise worked out; when we agree then we chose my way and when we disagree then we chose her way." ;-) - Brent

The way they are up high, I doubt the roots would grow down that much to affect your house. As far as any danger where they are, if they've been there like that for years, I would think all is fine. But if your house is a new building and those pines used to be part of a forest, and that forest continued where your home is now, and those trees used to have other pines near them, they may not be used to dealing with the wind without the help of other trees around them. I hope that makes sense.

no... you have two solutions for MATURE pines ... one.. get rid of them .. and solve the needle issue ... two ... remove the rock.. AND LEAVE THE NEEDLES UNDER THE TREES.. where they have naturally accumulated for millions of years ... let me ask you ... why are you forcing a preconceived notion of landscape rock under a pine tree ... pines are conifers .... ALL conifers shed their needles.. generally within 1 to 3 years ... increased by a good drought some years .. the thought that the situation .. on a 40 foot tree.. is going to get better.. or lessened in the future is problematic ... landscape fabric is a snakeoil salesman's joke on the gardening world.. a useless waste of money better spent ... as most weed seed is airborne .. so minutes after putting it down.. you have already been defeated ... roll this around.. if you left the pine needles to build naturally ... they would become a mulch.. a highly acidic mulch ... and reduce your weed problem exponentially ... you are actually defeating the trees attempt to suffocate weed production.. by removing the needles ... bob.. WAG here ... you are trapped in suburbia ... on a small lot.. with sidewalks and neighbors way to close.. and you are getting frustrated with a pine tree.. that in all reality.. is now becoming the FOREST MONSTER it is meant to be.. if there is any budget.. think long and hard about removal .. you are not going to change its inherent properties.. of growing and shedding needles ... in ITS lifetime ... otherwise.. its all good exercise ... good luck ken ps: you are stuck in a box .. i am trying make you look outside the box you have created .... Here is a link that might be useful: check out some of these pix.. you are fighting mother nature.. she ALWAYS wins ....

Just know that you are not alone... we had a magnificent row of white pines (on our property but overhanging the street) butchered by a town employee, riding in the bucket of a front-end loader with a chainsaw. As they raised the bucket, crawling down my curb, he cut a line straight up to about 12 feet. All to accommodate the snowplow, which had not in all the previous years ever bothered to plow all the way to the curb anyway, but which all of a sudden was (so we were told) "endangered" by the white pine branches (I personally have never met a white pine branch that was any match for a multi-ton snowplow, but there you are...) Needless to say, this resulted in many letters, many complaints, intervention by the first selectman and a reprimand for the "nonprofessional" "pruning" by the town. The reprimand must have REALLY ticked off the Public Works director, because next thing I knew (literally -- 8 am the VERY next DAY!), he sics the power company on my trees. Says his crew saw "plain evidence of arc-ing" (which if true, would be dangerous, I agree): of course, the power company themselves had "pruned" (i.e., topped!) the trees less than a year before. Pure retribution as far as I could tell! One more tree story: In that same line of trees lining the street (and forming, when we bought our house, a virtually solid privacy wall!) was a magnificent elm. A real, American elm. We spent a fortune injecting it to protect it against Dutch elm disease, and it was flourishing (not necessarily because of that, of course, since we subsequently learned that there was significant question about the merit of such treatments. Nonetheless, we did them and they weren't cheap!) Then the power company's tree guy came to the door on one of their many visits to butcher (ooops, "prune") the white pines, to ask my permission, as they must. I said (reluctantly) okay, but prune as lightly as possible and leave the elm alone (since I didn't think any of its branches were impacting power lines and I didn't want any unnecessary pruning of this beautiful specimen). We walked out together, he agreed with me, and told (while I stood there) the crew to leave it alone. I looked at about two hours later to see them lifting the bucket up to the elm. I RACED down the drive, planted myself at the base of their truck, and shouted up to the guy in the bucket: "SORRY GUYS -- You're DONE here!" (Further discussion ensued, of course, but in the end, they left, grumbling about "people like you, lady...") And as for line-of-sight, don't even ASK about my magnificent forsythia that the town wanted to remove. Even when a police officer came by and agreed it did not impede line of sight, they still sent someone out to "prune" it back. So a lovely old fountain of gold that never bothered anyone was turned in five minutes into a round little gumdrop. The public works guy -- when I confronted him in tears -- said "gee, lady, it looks MUCH better don't you think??" -- to which I (sobbing) said "take it OUT! if you're going to do that to it!!" (To which HE said "I can't take it out, I'm not authorized to do that..." Your tax dollars at work... Which is all just to say that I SO feel your pain! The irony is that two years after we moved from that house, a former neighbor told me that ALL those big white pines (which DID lose branches like mad every storm!!) had been taken out by the town! The reason: the roots were growing into the sewer lines in the street. Thank goodness I wasn't still living there -- they'd have had to lock me up for the duration! Final bizarre note: After the front-end loader butchering incident, the town offered, in response to my squawks, to "underplant" the trees they had butchered the lower 10 feet of, to try to fill in and restore some of our privacy. So in their infinite wisdom, what do they suggest they are willing to plant UNDER these troublesome white pines that are apparently destroying their snowplows? WHITE PINE SEEDLINGS!!!!!