I totally agree you should look for quality trees for the long run, but I'm honestly a fan of planting cheap, fast-growing trees that provide some shade or coverage in the short term, to be co-planted with good, slow-growing "legacy" trees and then sacrificed when your good stock grows in. I don't know your zone, but whatever the nursery has a lot of and is selling cheap in fall would work for me for a couple of years. Even if you only plant your good stuff from the outset, I think you will see results sooner than 10 years. Maybe things grow faster here in the rainforest, but I'm amazed what a 1-2 gallon tree (I like to buy them small if I can) can do in five years - a purple birch I bought as a 1-gallon is now the height of the house (2 and a half storeys). Not dense yet, but it's there. If you start with a $60-80 tree instead, usually a 1-2" caliper, in 3-5 years you will already have a shady spot to put down a blanket for the kids to play (if there are kids, if not, then for you to rest up from mowing :-)). It won't yet hold the mass of cool air that a bigger tree will do, but there will be shade. Above all, keep in mind that planting doesn't always have to be done right first time and forever. There are always trees available, and you can plant more and replace as necessary. Karin L

If these are plants that go dormant like hostas, ferns and such, I'd wait until spring. I'm sorry to hear about that, especially since some live trees were affected! But I hope you will enjoy the new sunnier areas come spring.

I would recommend removing one of the branches, but before giving a definitive answer I would like to know what type of crape myrtle you have. It should have come with a tag. Also, a picture of the whole tree so I can get a better perspective. If its a shrub and you want a unwieldy shrub, then let it be, but if it is situated in a prominent location in your landscape, then I would train it by pruning. A tree type crape can have only one main stem and look great in certain locations, I have 175 crape myrtles and most have 3-5 main stems, but I do have one stem ones here and there. Most of the shrubs ones have close to 5 stems and the tree types have 3. All of them were trained starting in 2000 and today I do minimum pruning.

...and even paper birch constantly gets an unwarranted and undeserved rap for "having problems". No, it's a lusty, fast-growing early-succession species which asks for little other than full sun and moist soil. Easy as pie, but if you have a stressed-out specimen and you're in the home range of BBB-bronze birch borer-a native insect pest of some birch, your tree could suffer. But the fact it's already predisposed to trouble via being stressed out indicates mistakes on the part of the grower/owner, not an intrinsic problem with the tree itself.