Six trees not to plant near a house, and what to plant instead

None of these six trees is worthless; two are native and magnificent in the right place. The trouble is that the right place is not a small lot beside a house, a driveway, a sidewalk and a sewer line, and each has a specific, well-documented way of becoming a problem there. Every one was chosen because it grows fast and looks good in year three. The alternatives, all from our own catalog, are mostly slower, and that is the point: a tree that puts on wood slowly holds its limbs, keeps its roots in the ground, and is still there when the house changes hands.

White mulberry

The problem: white mulberry came from China for a silkworm industry that never took, and it has since spread across the East on its own and onto invasive plant lists across the region. Birds eat the fruit and plant seedlings in every fencerow and foundation bed, the wood is weak and the crown drops limbs, the fruit stains sidewalks, cars and shoes for weeks, and the tree hybridizes with our native red mulberry and is slowly replacing it.

Instead: red mulberry, the native, has bigger leaves, longer and sweeter fruit and none of the invasive spread, though the fruit still stains, so give it a spot at the edge of the yard where the birds can have the mess. For fruit near the house with less of a carpet under it, an American persimmon holds its fruit until after frost.

Lacebark elm

The problem: lacebark elm was planted widely because it shrugs off Dutch elm disease, and its mottled bark is genuinely handsome. But it grows fast into a crown of narrow, weak crotches that split in ice and wind, it seeds heavily in the fall, and in the Southeast especially those seedlings are escaping into woods and stream banks and putting it on invasive-species watch lists.

Instead: American hornbeam gives you a small, tough tree with smooth, sinewy gray bark that is at least as interesting, orange-red fall color, and no seedlings in the neighbors’ beds. On dry ground, hop hornbeam is the same idea with shreddy bark and fine, elm-like texture.

Willows

The problem: a weeping willow is a pond tree, and a beautiful one, as long as the pond is far from anything you own. Willows use enormous amounts of water and send roots toward it wherever it is, which means drain lines, septic fields, footing drains and any cracked sewer lateral within reach. The wood is brittle, so the tree sheds twigs every week and limbs every storm, and most weeping willows are in decline by forty or fifty. A wet corner with room is the place for one; a wet corner by the house is not.

Instead: black gum takes wet ground and dry ground alike, has the best scarlet fall color in the East, feeds bees for weeks in spring, and lives for centuries instead of decades. Bald cypress is the other choice for a spot that floods, and on a lawn it rarely makes knees.

Silver maple

The problem: silver maple is native and grows faster than almost anything, which is why it lined every postwar street. Fast growth means weak wood; the tree forks into co-dominant stems with bark trapped between them, and those forks split. Its roots run along the surface, heave sidewalks and driveways, and find old clay sewer pipes. And it gets huge, seventy feet and more. In a floodplain it is a fine tree. Next to a foundation it is a slow argument with the house.

Instead: for a mid-sized shade tree, yellowwood reaches thirty to fifty feet, carries hanging white flower clusters in late spring, has smooth gray bark and roots that behave. For something that will still be standing in three hundred years, black gum again.

Tuliptree

The problem: tuliptree is native, grows straight and fast, and in a woodland it is one of the tallest and most beautiful hardwoods in the East. It is also far too big for a small lot, well over a hundred feet with time. It drops limbs in wind and ice, it sheds flowers, leaves and seed all summer in a dry year, and the aphids that colonize it rain sticky honeydew on whatever is parked or set beneath it, followed by black sooty mold. With a back acre, plant one and thank yourself in thirty years; with a patio, plant something else.

Instead: cucumber magnolia is the choice for someone with room for a big, fast tree: a straight, fifty-to-eighty-foot native magnolia with huge leaves and knobby fruit that turns scarlet for the birds, growing two to three feet a year on good soil. For the flowers-and-honey side of a tuliptree on a lot that cannot take one, sourwood blooms in July, feeds bees, and turns crimson in September, at half the size and in a bed rather than a lawn strip.

Callery pear

The problem: Bradford, Cleveland Select, Aristocrat and the rest are all Callery pear. The cultivars cross-pollinate, birds spread the fruit, and the thorny wild offspring have taken over old fields and roadsides from Pennsylvania to Texas. The branch unions are so weak that a typical Bradford splits in half at fifteen to twenty-five years old. The flowers smell like a fish market. Several states now ban its sale, and more are considering it.

Instead: serviceberry does everything people wanted from a Bradford pear: white flowers in early April before the leaves, a tidy fifteen-to-twenty-five-foot crown, orange-red fall color, plus a June crop of sweet fruit the robins and waxwings will race you for. Blackhaw is the choice for a dry, tough spot; white fringetree for a wet one; flowering dogwood for shade. Match the mature size to the space, the moisture to the site, and the species to the region, and most of the problems above never come up.