Best place to start looking for a tree for a Texas location at the link below. Unless you are planning on spending a lot of money on each tree you aren't going to have privacy right away. Here is a link that might be useful: Trees 4 Texas

Wow! Thank you for all the great tips/advice. Sorry for such a delayed response; been so busy with work and family and finishing basement projects. Always go, go, go around here. @Yardvaark - WOW! Thank you for putting together this concept sketch! Very nice for a visual person like myself. One thing I neglected to mention was future plan (3-5yrs) to have a shop built in north-eastern corner and driveway extended. Shooting for maximum width, but the wife wants yard, so theres some debate on what the final size will be. Fact is, no matter the size, it will provide some degree of privacy. Unfortunately we'll have 3-5 years of nothing there unless we do a bunch of some narrow, tall shrubs/trees. Thank you again for this design. I like the idea of bunching up the Chokecherry trees. I think we might place those in a non-key spot as they may be a little sparse for some time. @kitasei - Thank you. Don't mind the idea of something at edge of concrete. Closer to the east, we'll be extending the driveway to go further back. Along the patio we might consider some planter type material there. For the time being we like the openness of the yard as we have 4 kids that run around playing soccer, football, etc.. @Sherry_7bAL I totally understand the pitfalls of creating a line of anything which occurred to me shortly after the chokecherries went in. I have since shifted to love the cluster and variety idea. Like the trellis idea but cant commit on something, so it will take some research and reviewing of ideas to see if i can find something that "pops" out at me. I also dig Yaardvark's ideas with clustering chokecherries and think makes much more sense than trashing them. I'll capture some pics from back fence facing the house and post those. Thank you for you're thoughts! @kitasei - Great idea on the perimeter idea. I had planned on creating a border around the back yard. Wife thinks it will be too much to take care of. (weeds, etc..). We have made our other planting areas in front low maintenance by refreshing the top layers with soil-pep every 1-2 years and relying on Preen. The combination seems to keep weeds at bay. Those weeds that do pop through have such loosely packed roots, that they just pull right out. Ultimately, I would much rather have a variety of dense ground cover, but that will come in time. I would prefer that much more than relying on some chemical (Preen) for weed control. I had planned to use the soil-pep and Preen approach, at least initially, for perimeter in back. @NHBabs - YESSS.. I love your variety! This is exactly what I would love as long as I could use trees/shrubs hitting 15-20 ft in height in some points. I think combining what you have done and Yaardvark's awesome design would produce what I am really after. I LOVE IT. @kitasei - Totally agree with you on creating a border with gentile sweeps vs boring, straight runs and hard corners. Will take some effort to figure out depths at points. would like nice border to house our variety of privacy-giving trees/shrubs without taking too much from yard space. :) @Renee Texas Thank you - Will look into holly. At first thought, i suspect these can grow into dense hedges that will remain year round. They produce berries as well? Are they toxic to pets/humans? I'll need to research holly. Thanks again! @edlincoln Thanks! Trellis has definitely been on the list. I like vine idea. Will take some some planning, as you mentioned... don't want to get something too aggressive. There was a time where i wasn't too big on Spruce's, but i love them now. Thanks for the caution on the shade tolerance. Definitely prefer the variety of fast and slow growing pantings. Sort of a "Controlled forest". :) I'll look into Southern Magnolia, American Holly and Hemlock as options. Thank you! You're right about the Chokecherries. They're not terrible, but for what we were looking for, i think we've since identified better options (many of which have been covered here. :) ). Could always have been worse. :) It's a fine balance on space we want to dedicate to tree's. Totally understand there is a tradeoff between space and privacy. We would like to preserve as much usable yard space as possible, but privacy is, in this case, a necessity. By that, I mean a necessity to me for my personal comfort and well being (AKA Decompression zone). My wife is mixed on a private back yard. She's OK with it, and OK without it. :) She's a social butterfly whereas I can't quite say the same for myself. :) @lazy_gardens Yes - Totally agree on the build vs grow approach. Been kicking around the ideas. Would love to see the example you provided, but unfortunately looks like the link isn't working at the moment. Thanks everyone for your help! I really appreciate all of the guidance and advice you've provided. I have some planning to do. My problem is that I have a difficult time deciding what to eat for lunch, let alone decide on what to plant for years out of fear of disappointment. Sort of like the chokecherry idea. Wish we would have planned that out a little better. Another problem I have is when i get to nursery, i get stuck on the vast selection of varieties and without knowing more about the item, I think too much about it and cant commit, so end up leaving without anything planning to do more research then life gets in the way. :) I truly understand why folks hire landscapers. lol. Although I have no problem doing the work, i just need to know what i need to buy and where to plant it to obtain my goals and you all have helped a ton with that. Thanks again!

I wouldn't worry about the space you indicated being too shady for the EG arb - that's not enough shade to be a concern. But it is an extremely boring, overly functional choice (a reason why you find them big and cheap around here :-)) that is more typically used as a screening hedge than as a specimen plant. And our winter was a piece of cake until February! It is hard to reconcile a record breaking snowfall with a more typical winter here where we receive only a few inches of snow - if that - that is melted by the next day. A once in a 10-20 year freak snowfall would not deter me from planting the yew and the damage it might incur should that happen would be present elsewhere in your garden as well......like with the evergreen magnolias. But it is your garden and your choice :-) btw, the siting of the JM should be fine. It was just hard to see from the photo alone how close or distant it was from the side of the structure.

"... Goldspire Ginkgo, very columnar variety that is yellow in the fall and should mature to 14' - 16 tall and 5' - 6' wide." Oooh ... I don't think that's gonna happen. It will become much larger. Whenever size information comes from selling sources, it's 100% of the time going to be wrong. And they're stating a size after only a few years of growth, where the tree will not stop. Figure at least double size of whatever you're told. A fat clump of lilac in the tree form sounds like a great solution to the back right bed. You need some groundcover there, too. consider lily of the valley (so long as there's shade.) It does great there. Gotta be some Hosta somewhere, too. And daylilies in the sun. (From DeKalb originally.)