Don't Confuse Height with a Head Start
Before you dream about year ten, make sure you are buying a tree that has a real chance of surviving year one.
Even experienced gardeners can underestimate how vulnerable large evergreen privacy trees can be after planting. It is easy to assume the survival part is a given and that the only question is how tall the trees will be in five or ten years.
I have gardened my whole life. Before building this privacy screen, I had never planted large evergreen privacy trees at this scale. It honestly never occurred to me that some of those trees would be dead within six months.
Before you ask how tall a tree will be in ten years, ask whether it has what it needs to survive the first one.
Half of them died within the first year.
We once spent around $5,000 on ten tall Thuja Green Giants. They were about 7 feet tall, and they looked like they should have given us a huge head start. Then half of them died within the first year.
That loss taught us that a large tree is not automatically a safer tree. Size can hide stress. Height can hide poor roots. A delivery-day photo can hide what the tree will do once it has to live in your soil.
The first question is not: How tall is it today? The first question is: Can it live here?
A tree can arrive green, tall, and promising, then begin to fail within weeks or months. A privacy tree has to do more than arrive alive. It has to stay alive.
The bigger the transplant, the bigger the setback. Large trees can be heavy, difficult to plant, expensive to move, and slower to recover from stress. Madison, our 10-foot recovery tree, taught us this lesson clearly. Her size looked like an advantage until the weight of her root ball made planting nearly impossible.
Smaller starter trees are not instant privacy, but they can be easier to ship, handle, plant, water, and establish. They can begin life in their new soil with less weight, less handling trauma, and a root system that can adapt as the tree grows.
Don't ask only how tall the tree is today. Ask what kind of future wall it can become if it survives, roots in, and grows well.