No, I know you're not and I do take your very good point. But leylandii are
not suitable trees for those purposes. I can't see any problem with people
growing smallish specimen trees in city gardens and deriving and giving
great pleasure when planting them.

I suppose it depends on the definition of smallish. I like the roofline
to be broken up, which means in our area something like 20-30ft. Luckily
I have a church car park on one side, a public park to the north, shade
loving neighbours (with a grove of birch, and beyond them neighbours
with full grown horse chestnuts) to the W, so the only neighbours who
might be bothered are on the S, and what's shading their garden is their
own house!

My brother and his wife live in
Wandsworth and have a row of (IIRC) poplar trees at the bottom of their
garden which have had to be severely pollarded and trimmed but which do, at
least in summer, shield them from the neighbours at the bottom of their very
small garden.

grin
There was a row of those down our road in Sevenoaks - when I woke up
after the '87 storm, I looked out to see my car parked outside, with a
poplar neatly across the road just behind the rear bumper, and another
neatly just in front of the front bumper. And as daylight drew, I
realised this sequence - poplar, car, poplar, car - was repeated all the
way down the road in both directions.

At that point I realised I *wasn't* going to get to work that day.

Rhododendrons aren't trees, neither are Camellias but they can grow pretty
big and are evergreen AND can be clipped to the required size AND have
lovely flowers.

And they can take up the whole width of your garden! Whereas a tree is a
bush-on-a-stalk and you can still do things underneath ;-)

Don't forget, the last house I lived in (the one you came to) had rather a
small garden

In Leeds that would have been advertised as a large garden! Even in the
suburbs.

but someone had planted a potentially huge blue cedar in it
because they addmired the one in next door's MUCH bigger garden. I had the
horrible job of cutting down this lovely, still young tree because if I'd
left it to mature, nobody could have got in or out of the front door.

Yep. My mother used to plants deodar cedars then chop them down when
they reached 6in dia trunk and start again. There will come the time
when we have to fell our Araucaria, but for the moment it's giving us a
lot of pleasure.

We don't of course have any legal rights to sunshine in our gardens, and
if it's a building that's stopping the sun, there's not a thing we can
do. And IMO the Planning authorities are remarkably unconvinced by any
argument that a proposed building will shade your garden - though
personally I'd much prefer to be shaded by an inappropriate tree than by
someone's extension.
--
Kay Easton

Edward's earthworm page:
http://www.scarboro.demon.co.uk/edward/index.htm