How to select the proper trees for a new homes yard

After you move into your new house and begin to think about selecting some trees for your yard, you may find this more challenging than you expect.

First, the neighbors may be closer than you realized when you chose a lot on an empty street with no houses on it, and this may change your tree-planting ideas altogether. A privacy screen of small evergreens for the side yards a feature you had never considered may become the first priority, with shade and ornamental trees to be planted later.

How could the proximity of the neighbors come as a surprise? The average lot size for a new house in the Washington area is a generous 7,200 square feet, with a width of 60 feet. But the houses built on these lots are big, occupying about 40 feet of that width. This leaves only about 10 feet for each side yard and 20 feet between you and your neighbors, said Dan Fulton of John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Reston, who has studied the Washington housing market for more than two decades.

The second challenge: You cant just go down to the big box store nursery and select a good screening tree. In a new-home community, you have to do some fact checking first.

The local homeowners association (HOA) may have rules on your landscaping choices, dictating not only acceptable tree species but also the height in some instances, including that of a living fence between side yards, said Rockville lawyer Thomas Schild, who represents condominium and homeowners associations in the Washington area. Most HOAs in Maryland and Virginia do not address this, but some do. For this reason, homeowners should check the HOA documents before developing any landscaping plans, he said.

Youll also have to locate the swales on your property because you cant plant trees or shrubs in them. A swale is a shallow ditch. In new home communities, they run across individual lots channeling rainwater into the storm sewer system. Swales are often so shallow that homeowners have no idea they are there, especially when the grading is so subtle the yard appears to be essentially flat. Despite its near invisibility, a swale serves a critical function. Legally you cannot plant anything in it that will impede the flow of water or affect a neighboring property.

The location of the swales will be indicated on the site plan of your lot, which your builder included in the documents he submitted to get a building permit for your house. If your builder is still active in your community, you should be able to get this information from his sales agent or someone in his construction trailer. If not, you may have to go the office where your builder applied for a permit to get a copy of your site plan.

Once you get the site plan and study it, youre likely to discover that a swale runs along one or both of your side-yard property lines (half of it is on your side and half on your neighbors), exactly where you envisioned a living fence of screening trees. You may still be able to implement this plan if the swale is narrow enough, said Jim Baish, a Frederick landscape architect and land planner who has designed the land-use plan for many new-home communities in the Washington area. For example, a 5-foot-wide swale down the middle of the 20-foot-wide area between houses would leave you 71/ 2 feet to work with, enough room for a row of small evergreens, he said.

Your site plan may also indicate a utility easement running across your front yard where underground lines for electricity, gas, cable and phone are buried, Baish said. The easement can be as wide as 15 feet from the curb toward your house; inside this area, a utility has the right to remove a tree if its roots are causing a problem. This is far less likely if you contact Miss Utility, a local service (District and Maryland, 800-257-7777; Virginia, 800-552-7001) that arranges for each utility to come and locate its lines, usually by spraying a different stripe across your lawn, so that you can factor this into your tree-planting decisions.

When youre finally ready to start selecting trees, youll discover that much of the advice has changed since you bought a tree for your old house 20 years ago. Back then, the emphasis was on ornamentals and bigger trees that looked good and were easy to maintain. The easy-to-maintain part is still true, but ecological and environmental considerations are the new starting point.

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How to select the proper trees for a new homes yard