Dax says: "Why am I even writing anything more, I don't know". Experience and determination to see people making hard decisions on what to grow get it right the first time. The guy just cares. Wass... Hetz Wintergreen is the best candidate for your needs. Dax is right. Wass... are you going to build this garden from small potted seedlings and 1 gal. conifers. Plan on living their along time to get the look you ultimately want to enjoy. You should possibly think bigger...especially your focal point plants to get this thing going. Does your local nursery buy from Iseli or other PNW growers. If they will special order and piggy back your order with theirs, for this Spring order, that could be beneficial in getting this thing going. The plus side is finding your plants quicker by the large selections they offer. Forget about the root ball myth. If I took into account all the mis-information out there and applied it to my garden, trying to sort the good from the bad, I wouldn't be growing anything. Go with your best instincts. What you accomplished with your former place was very professional and that tells me a lot. Time to put away those insecurities and get moving. The plan is right, the prepration time is right...so get moving. The 6' Picea omorika price is about right for end of season sales. I would be leery of a conifer in B&B state that has been sitting around all summer. Some what compromised for sure unless it has been up potted to insure its integrity. Check needles and root ball. Make sure root ball is not broken. Don't buy if it is. Good luck and keep us updated as to your progress. Dave

I have not seen any mention of Blackgums! Beautiful, large trees with truly blood colored foliage in the fall (They also provide little blue berries for the birds!). They grow fairly quickly and are pretty tolerant of drought conditions. Something we put in last year was a Princeton American Elm. Unbelievably fast grower and was bred to have resistance to Dutch Elm disease. There really is a reason they were so widely planted as street trees and would provide high shade for your front yard relatively quickly. They are also reputed to be very tolerant of city pollution. No mention of Red Cedar, either. Grows quickly, immune to virtually everything and has a nice grayish color which contrasts nicely with the dark greens of other trees. I have mixed them into our overstory oaks/maples etc. with podocarps, firs and deodars for a nice tapestry of color and texture. They give good cover for camellias from winter burn. Any kind of magnolia does well! We have planted virtually every kind we could find and they have distinguished themselves into overstory and understory nicely over the years. The Sweet bays smell particularly wonderful and are a good open, midsized tree without too much spread. They tend to get very thin in winter, however. The Little Gems have the advantage of blooming until frost without getting overly large. American Hollies are magnificent, but are difficult to get started for some reason. Once one is happy, however, they will take off. Mary Nells or Oakleafs might be a good compromise. River Birch, of course, is incredibly fast growing and would do well in your seasonally wet areas. They have beautiful yellow leaves in Fall, nice open shade in summer and gorgeous exfoliating bark. Finally, esh had a good suggestion in bald cypresses. We have one that is always commented upon by those who come over, especially in the Fall when the needles turn golden and carpets the ground around it. A truly beautiful tree and a fast grower. As he mentioned they do well in both dry sites and wet. The only difference to my eye is speed of growth and density of needles/boughs.

I think 17 feet sounds like plenty of space for each tree, and I'd expect them to live a full life span with that spacing. As you mention, each tree could grow larger with a little more space, but I think they will do fine the way you want to plant them. One concern might be that if one species grows faster than the other one the faster grower might cause the slower one to grow crooked instead of straight up up as you'd probably like.

e, There's probably some scholarly articles published somewhere, but my evidence is somewhat anecdotal, based on observation and discussion with folks who've been at it way longer than me. Dr. David Griffith, a long-time southern pear enthusiast, was also a collector of Southern black walnuts with superior timber type (not very common once you get south of KY/TN) - and he'd expressed quite a bit of exasperation at trying to 'restore juvenility' in trees grafted with scions from those big, old mature BWs - the grafts just did not 'want' to make an upright, rapidly-growing tree with the clear bole needed for timber/veneer production - presumably due to 'switching off' of genes coding for that type of growth in the mature tree. If you think of the difference between thorny, upright seedling citrus and the more spreading, thornless(or at least less-thorny), orchard trees produced by using 'old budline' plant material...I think it's a good illustration of the phenomenon.