Oh dear! I just planted a holly TREE (female) away from the house far enough that I can see it from the deck. I love the look of a nice holly TREE. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, that is the tree planted along the streets in those small planting pockets, they look great, they grow straight, they keep their leaves all year, and they are hard to kill....sounds good to me. BUT, at the house we had on the river (destroyed by Katrina), there were holly shrubs with trunks about 5" diameter, kept the size of the large camellias also planted near the house. All of these survived the salty flood waters without a stutter. They are still on the vacant lot, and far be it from me to try to dig them up. :) All your experiences remind me of the agony we are going through trying to rid ourselves of some darned CAMPHOR TREES. Those roots WILL come back. Each seed eaten by a bird will be pooped into the lawn somewhere, and I make sure I pull up seedlings before we cut the grass each week. One camphor tree we had to use the car to extract the root. We used a chain attached to the trailer hitch. As a boat captain, I can tell you DO NOT GET IN THE PATH OF A LINE UNDER TENSION...especially if it is NYLON. Like a bullwhip, they can come back on you and remove an arm or eye or (as happened to a man offshore) a head. It is very dangerous to keep increasing tension on a line. So just apply SO MUCH, and stay off to one side neither in front of nor behind the direction of pull. A well sharpened pickax (adz if you are from the nawth) can eat through a lot of wood.

This is Judy in CA: I just got the biggest laugh read all these rose Bush stories!! Been there done that! In fact one of my sons is coming over tomorrow with his chain saw to hack my four Cecile Bruner roses off at the ground. Then I will use the salt and boiling water trick and see what happens. I planted them seven years ago as a pseudo fence. Used poles and wires and they were beaut the first three or four years. Then I had to trim them sever times a week so they didn’t slap us in the face and stab us with thorns! Plus they were no blooming as before and grown over and into my neighbor’s shed( the pruning got away from her)!!🥴. So my project last sunmet was to cut them to fence height and keep them as small bushes. They had other ideas and I was pruning all the time again to keep them “in shape”! So this year it is bye bye. After the chain saw massacre, I will do as I’ve said plus use the black trash bag on top and pit a barrel with a different rose bush in it that is very well behaved and sm divine! I paved over one at my other house but lo and behold I noticed a “weed” growing up about five feet out from the paving in the middle of my ground cover and yes, it was the pesky rose bush trying to reassert itself. Don’t remember how I dealt with it but I did get rid of it without much trouble. I must have caught it early before it got too much of a hold. At least I feel better that I’m not the only one having this problem. Best thing- use pots for roses!!!

Thank you both. We did get our money's worth as far as I'm concerned; our entire yard was hopelessly overgrown and it took 4 men 9 hours to get it cleared out. This is just one plant in one small bed, and I didn't specifically ask them to remove these plants. That was my mistake. My guess is that they assumed they were lilies that I wanted to keep. They did a perfect job with everything else so I'm not at all dissatisfied with them. Knowing what they are and what to do really helps me; I can go out and dig up some of the roots and thin them out, and then see what happens next spring. They have been in for 10 years and never flowered, but perhaps they've always been too crowded. I'll give it a try and see if I get any blooms next year. Thanks for your help!

Not just the stump. The suckers grow everywhere there is a root - and there is a TON of root structure with these trees. I had 2 sissoos cut down last November. The stumps were treated more than once - and we drilled and treated above ground roots. But I'm still treating 10-20 suckers every morning with concentrated herbicide. Grinding or removal is essential (not optional) for these trees. Despite the lovely shade, they're awful trees for urban areas.