Look, maybe the spruces work for you, or will for a couple of years yet. Especially with cars occasionally coming off the road at your house, I'm not going to be the one to suggest you take them down without having a good replacement plan. A wood fence doesn't offer the same kind of barrier as tree trunks 6 feet apart. Personally, as I said on the other thread, I would try to plant a replacement row and let it grow in a bit before taking down the spruces, even if it is city property. Depends on your municipality. But you make a good point about salt spray. I'm sure there is a right plant though. Or, you could take out every second spruce first and plant something new in between them, and then when those get big enough cut down the other spruces and fill in those holes. It could even be new spruces, you've got one new one in with the big ones now anyway. So your barrier would be in a state of perpetual renewal and never entirely gone, not the worst thing. But your priority seems to be to make use of the backyard. I have to admit I don't understand this, given that you have a huge yard in the front that is probably quieter and safer. Maybe it's that your house is organized for easy exit to the back and not the front? Or you'd rather be closer to the road to get privacy from the neighbours? As for a structure, it can be as reliable and strong as you make it. If you buy a pre-fab from Canadian Tire or your local equivalent, it will obviously blow away unless you pack it away every winter. But if you sink some serious posts seriously deep and build the rest out of serious dimensional lumber with good joinery, it could be as solid as a house. By the way I think you'll always be cutting those trees down, not selling or moving them. They're common and fast-growing trees so I don't think anyone would have to go to the trouble of trying to dig them out. KarinL

Gobluedjm, the landlady doesn't want to be bothered with fixing anything whatsoever unless it's an immediate emergency (and even then, only grudgingly, often after yelling at us that we ought to just fix things ourselves at our own expense). So unless the flooded yard starts producing toxic mold or something, we're out of luck there. Renee, your patios and paths are gorgeous! I'm not sure it would make sense to create a work of art like that in a rental, though; I might get halfway done creating it and then move out, and it would just be a bother for the landlady to have to remove so many pieces of rock and bricks that never coalesced into a finished pathway. Or even if I finished it, the landlady might still hate it and find it annoyingly difficult to remove. Sue and Renee, I'm definitely interested in improving the drainage ditch, including lengthening it, widening it, possibly deepening it (though deepening it is a bit more difficult) and turning it into a dry stream bed. I need some advice about how to do those things, though. Currently, mud tends to gradually fill in the drainage ditch over time, so I have to re-dig it about twice a year. That would need to stop before I could turn it into a dry streambed, or else the rocks would just end up buried under the mud, and it would be ten times as difficult to re-dig with all the rocks in it. I believe Renee has mentioned something in the past about using plants around the edges of a drainage ditch to hold the dirt in place and prevent the mud from filling it in. I'm interested in doing that, but I'm not quite sure where to start. Should the plants go on the walls of the drainage ditch, or on the flat surface right above the drainage ditch? Does it depend on the plant? I'm especially thinking of trying Carex pregracilis there, but I'm not sure whether to put it on the flat surface or on the walls of the ditch. Currently the drainage ditch is about 12" to 18" deep and 12" to 18" high. It feels like a little bit of a hazard at times, because I've occasionally stepped into it without having realized I was so close to it. I think that making it deeper would make it more dangerous and also more prone to filling with mud, whereas making it wider might make it less dangerous, more useable as a pathway for the dogs, and hopefully less prone to filling with mud. What do you think? I'm aware that the path should ideally be wider. I'm not looking forward to widening it, though, because to widen the path I have to move the drainage ditch over. The only thing more discouraging than digging a drainage ditch through icky clay is trying to move that drainage ditch later - building the soil back up on one side while removing it from the other side. I already had to move it slightly just to fit the path in at all. I'm having a hard time imagining how to fit raised beds into my very naturalistic garden design style. Renee, if you were putting a raised bed made from scrap lumber into my yard, where you place it? Sue's suggestion of berms seems more my style, but I'm not terribly sure where I'd want to put the berms, either. The soil is only very slightly sloped upward near the house as a result of my efforts last year to excavate the existing drainage ditch and mound the excess soil along the house. I want to make sure that any additional berms I might put in would not accidentally redirect the water back toward the foundation of the house again. I don't think I have the dedication to keep plants alive in pots in the summer. I lose too many plants to drought already every summer, even when they're planted directly in the ground. I'm definitely aiming to create the kind of garden where the plants are mostly self-sufficient and, though they might benefit from regular weeding and occasional watering, would not drop dead if I occasionally ignored them for a couple of weeks.

Now I am a bit worried ... having had 2 people respond with ultimate height info contrary to what I had thought ... I particularly did not want a blue spruce that grows to full height ... that means 40 - 50 ft. tall and 10 - 20 ft. wide ? (sigh...) My corner has phone/electric wires, not directly overhead but close, over the sidewalk, and if this tree gets that big, it will dominate the whole corner. I don't know if I will have room to walk from the driveway to the backyard. (well, maybe a slight exaggeration, but ...) Also, I am trying to keep all plantings on the corner back 10-15 ft from the road so I won't block the view for traffic. I hope this tree wasn't a mistake ... The lady at the nursery said it grows slowly, at 1" - 2" (inches) per year. Is that accurate ? I feel a bit at a loss now of what to do ... I guess the Monrovia tag on the tree was misleading ... ultimate height of 12-15 ft./width of 10-12 ft. I also saw a "Baby Blue Eyes" Spruce there but this Fat Albert was a better price and the Baby Blue Eyes said the mature height was 40'. Planting doesn't seem as simple as I thought.

Brandon is completely right! This is rather embarrassing - when I left my first comment I was typing picea (spruce), but thinking abies (fir)! Spruce does perform well here, and there are several specimens of blue spruce here in Spring Hill that look fine. It's often listed zone 2 - 7 or 2 - 8. But planting a fir of any kind would be cruel as it just would never survive. Junebug, you're right that the other conifers wouldn't give the same contrast as the spruce, which is just fabulously chunky! I think I'm coming around to rooting for the spruce if it does well in your area. I'm thinking I might myself replace my blue stars with it too:) I don't think as many folks are on our forum right now, so you're not getting as much advice you might otherwise. You may want to consider posting on the conifer forum, or researching to see if local botanical gardens grow this plant. Best of luck! BTW, your plantings sound gorgeous! I started drooling at Coral Bark Maple:)