Do not plant cedars anywhere near a place you want to be able to sit. Mosquitos LOVE cedars.
White oaks are supposed to be trees you plant for future generations, but they actually grow fairly quickly in their early years (I have a seven-footer in partial shade started from a foot high specimen a few years ago). They are magnificent trees with good fall color.
As for storm damage, we lost a young American smoke tree (broken off at ground level) and the top third of a tall white pine in our severe thunderstorm of last Friday. Our other American smoke tree did just fine (I recommend this tree (Cotinus obovatus) as a good American native with fall color and relatively quick growth). Most smoke trees that you see in landscapes are the purple-leafed variety which is fine, but doesn’t have the good fall color.
Look around your neighbourhood and see what’s thriving in the environment. That should give you a good starting place.
Next consider a couple of fruit trees. I know people think they are too much work, but two or four, that you purposely keep short and small, like cherries or apples, are awesome once they start to produce for you. Plant them first, they will take a few years to get to fruiting, the time will fly by!
Please come back and tell us of your picks, gardeners love to hear such schemes!
Ah, that’s what those are! I’ve seen them in people’s yards but didn’t know how to describe them well enough to look them up. Thank you.
My personal experience with the trees from the Arbor Day Foundation: The trees, if you could call them that (and that’s only with a huge dose of imagination) were not much more than twigs with near nothing roots. They came in a plastic shipping bag and were so poorly labeled, we had no clue what they were. I had originally planned on giving some to friends and planting a few, but because there were so many different ones, and it was nearly impossible to tell which were which (some had faded colors on them, while others had no colors to match to a piece of paper with a description of the “tree”), I ended up planting one and not the others. My friends declined to take any, as they didn’t know what types of trees they were planting.
Had I to do it all over again, I would elect not to order trees via the Arbor Day Foundation. Of course, I have a smaller piece of property (about a third of an acre). If I had more property and wanted to simply fill in with trees, then it might be fine, but I’d not be able to be picky about the trees planted.