If you plant Thuja plicata 'Green Giant' trees where your schematic shows that you first intended to plant Leylands, you will end up with a more resitant tree to pests and disease. These trees used to be hard to find in my local nurseries back in Fall of 2004. In fact, only one local nursery in my area had this tree. A local cemetary had ordered one hundred of the T P 'GG' trees from this nursery, and at the time of order, it took this local nursery 2 years to find a grower who could ship them 200. In Fall of 2004 it blessed me to discover that this local nursery had the trees, when no other nursery in town carried them. Ever since then this and other local nurseries have continued to offer T P 'GG' for sale. The first Nursery to sell these trees locally has proven stock which has survived drought, late season freezes in the early Spring, and severly destructive freezing rain events, which all over the city caused the worst destruction to even mature trees. Yet both their's and my GGs have survived nicely. This part of northeastern OK also receives lots of gusting wind events. Today we are forecast to have high winds with gust speeds up to 35 mph. Still none of my well established Thuja's have ever blown over. GG trees do not suffer damage from snow load, and my established ones did not break or uproot even when we received four days of off and on rain which froze once the icing coated the GG's branches. These young 9 feet tall trees did not break. In fact even though the weight of the increasingly accumulating ice buildup caused the tops my GGs to bend all the way to the ground, none of them broke, and there was no branch failure. Not one of these trees were pulled up by the roots from the weight of the ice bending their tops to the ground. My Thuja plicata Green Giants performed that well, even when during this bad icing event, my two 20 feet tall Shumardi oak trees suffered just over 50% canopy branch failure. On the back boundry area of a 1/2 acre vacant lot I own, among a staggered row of Loblolly pine trees which were still young enough to have lower branching, but had also grown almost 15 feet tall, 4 of them that were more toward the middle of the planting had main leader trunks, which due to the destructive icing event, snapped about 5 - 6 feet up from the ground. Even so, my Thuja Plicata GGs did not snap off, suffer branch failure, or uproot. Of course, in windy conditons, 5-6 feet tall GGS do have to be staked when they are first planted, late Summer 2007, I planted two staggered rows of some 5-6 feet tall GGs as a north windbreak in the northerly back yard of a house which experiences almost a wind tunnel affect. These trees did not have to be staked until the icing event described above occured. Once they get the chance to become well established, by Spring 2009, I feel confident that their stakes can be removed and these GGS should do fine even during sever wind producing...

I have a similar location for foundation planting with a roof overhang of 30 inches. We have three camellias over 50 years old that grew up above the roof. When the roof and gutters needed replacing, I cut two of the camellias down to four feet, and the other one to one foot. All have done well since, blooming every year. I also have a Daphne I keep at about four feet that blooms around Christmas and is very fragrant. We also have a fuchsia magellanica that survives the winter with some frost back, helped by the roof overhang. It recovers in the spring and blooms all summer up until the frost, feeding a lot of hummingbirds, and entertaining us. Al

Simpson Stopper (Myrcianthes fragrans) or Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria). Both are native and need no care once established. They are evergreen and dense growing and if they get to big tolerate heavy pruning. They also both produce berries for birds and the dense growth is good for cover and nesting. The flowers on Simpson Stopper are fragrant. With the Yaupon Holly, find the "wild" species type. A lot of the time nurseries sell the dwarf compact forms, such as 'Schillings', 'Stoke's Dwarf' or 'Bordeaux'

I think most of us are choosing our favorite lily, not the best photo of a lily. It helps to know the purpose of the photo too. All of your photos are gorgeous representations of the flowers, which makes it hard to choose. On photographic criteria alone, I would not choose a photo with a name tag in it, but perhaps I'm weird. I also look at the background. My favorite photo here is the first Chang Dynasty and second is Sherry Lane Carr. But I have no idea how to judge a photo, so take it with a grain of salt! Fruit Loops is just delicious. So is Autumn Wood. Now I see what all the hoopla is about with this daylily. Renee