In article , griffon wrote:

Oh, the willow is going somewhere in the back acre of the yard by
itself, where it has lots of room to be pretty.

It'll need a good deal of water to thrive.

As for beeches, you
never see _any_ of them for sale here. I actually once saw a 'Black
Swan' when out of town and almost bought it, but I did not. I called
the nursery the next day and it was gone. Seeing your page about one
just makes me hate it more that I did not buy it. I see them online
and they are like one foot tall and $50.00 or something. Which is
much more unreasonable than say, $350.00 for a tree that is a few feet
tall. At least you can see it.

Do you have any complaints at all about your 'Black Swan'?

It has gotten quite big around the base, now reaches to the tip-top of our
two-story house, has something praiseworthy about it in every season. It's
just always been one of the very best things I ever installed, &
completely trouble-free.

If nurseries in your area don't offer beech cultivars as standard plants
you might want to ask around about why. Possibly there's some reason they
don't do as well in your area. Or maybe it's only that the best growers
developing them for sale are outside the affordable-shipping range, but
otherwise your zone & conditions would be fine.

That and an 'Autumn Moon' japanese maple are on my list of trees that
I will go out of town to find if possible, although none of my
contacts online have ever seen one at nurseries in the general area.
I am considereing ordering several little japanese maple cultivars so
I can get some more exotic ones at like 1 foot tall, and make a
mini-garden with them and various flowers and such. Let them grow
slowly into something more substantial. I think it could actually look
really neat if I do it right.

I got a five-foot-tall Oshio Beni four years ago, it's now ten feet &
Granny Artemis trained it as it grew so it has good form & is now a
perfectly shaped tree even at its present size. If not trained, the fast
growing types of saplings will get to looking like fat maple-leafed bushes
instead of like trees. One problem with the young Japanese maples is they
start out being semi-shade plants & can be delicate or not live up to
their color potential if out in a lot of sun; they become more
sun-tolerant as adults but even then some of them would wish for some
bigger trees nearby to shade at least part of each day, growing them in
groups sometimes permits them to shade each other a tiny bit, but they
won't like to be dug up & moved so if they're going to be close together
while little they should be in containers until big enough to plant in
permanent spots.

-paggers

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/