My property is filled with crappy trees.
My back and side yards have 9 sugar hackberry trees, two of which are large. Sugar hackberry trees are horrible urban landscape trees. They have brittle wood that breaks in wind and ice storms, their leaves get galls from a parasite, they are frequent hosts to mistletoe, and they just look bad. These trees would be fine on borders of expansive properties, but they are wholly inappropriate for urban lots.
One of our large hackberries split down the middle during the last storm, so we have to get it removed. Another large hackberry is choked off by vines, and it naturally leans as if it is poised to fall on the house. That one needs to go, too. Since we are spending major bucks on those two trees, we might as well get rid of the remaining, smaller hackberries before they get out of hand. Due to all the electrical wires in the back yard, I have to hire professionals to take care of all these trees.
The previous homeowners planted a silver maple in the front yard near the house. This tree species is about as bad as sugar hackberry trees. They are weak-wooded, and their roots are bad on sidewalks and foundations. This tree would have been fine in the back corner of a lot or on an open field, but 8 feet from the front porch is a horrible place. If that’s not bad enough, the tree was placed so that it blocks much of the view from the front door, and it does not shade the house in a meaningful way.
Hackberry and silver maple trees are so bad, they are among the nine unprotected tree species in the Dallas tree ordinance.
There is an overgrown Carolina laurel cherry shrub in our front landscape. It is about 15-20 feet high. This shrub shades most of the front landscape, making it impossible to grow quality landscape plants. Furthermore, it has a horrible problem pushing up root suckers. No matter how much you pull out these suckers, they come back. You have to rip out whole roots to stop the root suckers.
After the hackberries, maple, and laurel cherry are gone, I will be left with a mature American Elm, a mediocre redbud (it’s bloom is unimpressive, and it looks trashy the rest of the year), a great juniper (currently being choked out by hackberrys), and a craggy pecan.
