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Trees can raise your property value, improve air quality, prevent erosion, lower your air conditioning costs with welcome shade, and provide a handy support for your hammock. Not too shabby, eh?

For most home gardeners, trees in the landscape are often already present but need care and pruning to look good and remain healthy. Or you may be shopping for one or more ornamental or fruiting trees to add. As with shrubs, your options include deciduous (ones that drop their leaves each fall; they may flower and fruit or have berries or seedpods) and evergreen (with leaves or needles that remain year-round).

Favorite trees for home landscapes include

 Flowering and deciduous: Catalpa, dogwood, dove tree, golden chain tree, horse chestnut, magnolia, redbud, serviceberry, silk tree, snowbell, and stewartia

 Shade trees: Ash, basswood, beech, catalpa, elm, ginkgo, honey locust, Kentucky coffee tree, linden, locust, various maples, various oaks, sourwood, sweet gum, and tupelo

 Evergreen: Arborvitae, cedar, cypress, false cypress, fir, hemlock, juniper, Norfolk Island pine, pine, spruce, and yew

 Fruit and nut trees: Almond, apple, apricot, avocado, cherry, chestnut, citrus, crabapple, fig, filbert (hazelnut), juneberry, loquat, mulberry, nectarine, olive, pawpaw, peach, pear, pecan, plum, quince, and walnut

Roles trees can play involve things like

 Shade

 Privacy (including noise reduction)

 Grandeur and substance in the landscape

 Food (fruits, berries, and nuts — for you and your family as well as for wildlife)

 Decorative beauty due to foliage (including fall color!)

 Shelter and food for birds and other wild creatures

Referring to any trees as terrible may be heresy, but some trees can cause real problems like producing huge quantities of seeds that sprout all over where they aren’t wanted and messy seed heads or fruit that are a pain to clean up. Some trees produce soft, weak growth that results in limbs breaking and falling on your house. Some of the undesirables are boxelder (sheds fruit and twigs, plus shelters yucky boxelder bugs), Bradford pear (heavy seeding and splitting branches), ginkgo (stinky fruit), silver maple (splitting branches), sweetgum (nuisance spiny balls), and tree of heaven (weak weedy growth). For checking out other invasive trees refer to www.invasive.org/species/trees.cfm.

For much more information on trees in general, please turn to Chapter 12. For info on fruit and nut trees, check out Chapter 18.