Not much interesting if you want small. Au contraire!! 'Small' trees are those typically considered to be 30' or less in height at maturity. And there are a good many to choose from: Acer ginnala - Amur maple Acer campstre - Hedge maple Acer griseum - paperbark maple Acer palmatum, japonicum, shirisawanum - Japanese (NOT Jap!) or Asian maples Aesculus pavia - Red buckeye Amelanchier - serviceberry Cercis - Redbud Chionanthus - Fringe tree Cornus kousa, mas or florida - Dogwoods Crataegus - hawthorn Halesia carolina - Carolina silverbell Koelreuteria paniculata - Golden Rain tree Laburnum - Golden Chain tree Lagerstroemia - Crape myrtle Various magnolia species Malus sp. - Flowering crabapples Oxydendrum - Sourwood Pyrus salicifolia 'Pendula' - weeping willowleaf pear various ornamental cherries and plums. Styrax japonica - Japanese snowbell Plus, this doesn't take into consideration any of the dwarf forms of larger growing trees, like the Ginkgo, or dwarf conifers. And the list is often larger in different areas, depending on native species present specific growing conditions or invasiveness issues.

My now 5 foot tall Sourwood seems to have grown no more taller, than it was when I first planted and staked it years ago. I found my tree almost 5 years ago from, among some Sourwood shrub looking trees, which I think was started by seed, at the local nursery a couple years before that. All this nursery's Sourwood trees looked like they had been left to grow naturally and not staked or trained. None of them had a strong straight main leader. I picked the most promising looking one, took it home and planted it in a a higher elevated and well draining location of my yard where the tree could also extend it's roots several yards away where they could access lower elevated soil which remained moist longer due to that area sloping some. The slightly lower area where the tree's roots had the option to extend its newly growing roots into, had originally been excavated to provide better drainage for the generous amounts of storm water runoff which flow through that part of our yard. When I got my tree home, I had to force straight, the arching to the ground, more bush looking formed tree. Even this tree's main leader trunk was so curved to the ground that the only thing I could do was to pound into the ground a 7 foot tall Oak 1" x 1" post and tie the trunk to it. Today, the tree still looks like it has not grown any taller. In fact the top 4 inches of the 5 foot tall main leader has never leafed out or shown any signs that it has grown at all. Beneath those doemant top four inches, there currently is a nice structure of radiating side branches. These side branches are not quite 3 feet long, and each of the last 4 summers these side branches have flowered abundantly, and grown leaves which turn the most beautiful colors in the fall. In fact, since almost 4 years ago when I planted a Persian Persica tree about 30 feet Northwest of my Sourwood tree; ever since in the Fall, the colors on my sourwood tree's leaves simply steal the show from my P P tree's fall leaf display. The Sourwood is such a beautiful tree, but from my experience I can certainly determine that people are not kidding who write the reports listing that sourwood trees grow slowly. Even thogu the trunk and branches on mine do appear to have developed stonger, but I still do not know when I should remove the stake. It would be nice to see some new top growth, for some clue as to whether or not that new growth would be strong enough to not need the present kind of staking. Of course after almost 5 years, it might be long past due the time when I should have removed the post stake, and at the most switched to a better "T" stake system which should let the trunk receive enough pressure from winds to help the tree to strengthen better on it's own. I really do not know. Growing this tree had definately been an experiement for me. Good thing the tree is so resiliant, because at least it has remained alive through several years of drought, several early spring, late freezes, and our more recent destructive week of freezing rain, which accumulated so much ice on some of my 12 foot tall loblolly trees that their main trunks broke 4 and 5 feet above ground. Also in that icing storm, two of my 30 year old Shumard oak trees expenrienced so much branch failure that now after corrective pruning the tree look very ugly. Still my little staked sourwood tree did not break at all, and again this year leafed out nicely.

Katrina1 -- basically what you said is all correct. The road improvement work was done over 20 years ago, so I'm "used to" that by now. But in essence, yes, people are now as much as 40 feet closer to my bedroom windows than they were in the 1980's. I can see heads walking by mere feet from my windows now. The public pathway is not straight, but very undulating, so its distance from my house varies over its course. In essence, though, what they did was put it diagonally through the front corner of my yard closest to my house, so that it would line up with a sidewalk on the other side of the street built previously by a private developer. And yes, I do have 2.2 acres total, almost all "back yard" When the house was built in the late 1940s zoning mandated it be close to the road. Later that was changed and the newer homes on the street are set back much further. Oh well, can't change that now. A big privacy fence would be great but not in the budget. It will be more budget friendly privacy plantings, including a lot of thorny things to keep people out of the yard and more upright vegetation to block the view at critical points. I'm planning on planting some taller ornamental grasses and also some vines on trellises. I'm seriously toying with planting some of my blackberries out there, although the rest of the fam is against that. Some of that will be my 4th of July weekend project maybe, if I get to it. The rest of it might have to wait until fall when I won't have to water it so much. But thanks for your reply.

Around the first of August several of us here suddenly got terrible outbreaks of blackspot. We had all been spraying regularly, but it just looked like we had been spraying with blackspot spores. We had quite a bit of leaf drop, and it was very difficult to control, even when hitting them with Manzate three times as prescribed. When the weather finally cooled off, it seemed to slow down quite a bit. Now it looks like mine have Cercospora. Big black round spots, but the leaves aren't turning yellow and dropping. I guess it's true - "If it isn't one thing, it's another".