"paghat" wrote in message
news
In article , wrote:

Doug Kanter wrote:

....to plant this spring in a spot where disgusting dog owners like to
stop their filthy beasts on my property. Shrub must be capable of
inflicting enough damage to send the dog to the vet. I'm thinking of
barberry. Open to suggestions for other shrub options. The planting
spot
receives sun for about 2/3 of the day, and will be buried in snow for
3
months out of the year.

What about Pyrocantha

I'd think that'd be the best choice. A very pretty "wall" could be grown
of mixed shrubbs starting with pyrocantha as about the biggest thing.
There are hundreds of varieties of hawthorns, some have three to five inch
spikes, most of which would do very well in places with very cold winters
& lots of snow. Barberry bushes & rugosa roses are good intermediate-sized
impenetrable shrubs, euphorbia crown-of-thorns for something shorter, &
vicious groundcovers like some creeping rubra species, or
smilex/greenbriar, or dwarf crimson barberry. A natural barrier of spiky
plants could be very beautiful, flowery, & winter-berried for year-round
color, though one would require enough room in one's yard to steer pretty
clear of it while relaxing, & buy some gardening armor come pruning time.

Rugosa! I lived with a 20' row of those for as many years and loved them. I
keep forgetting.

The spot in question is about 50' from the house, on a street corner.
There's a street sign, and the town could, in theory, say they need access
to it regularly, but I wasn't planning on consulting with them. Anyway...to
narrow the choices a bit: I used to have a monster of a barberry next to my
garage. It was 8 feet high and 5 feet wide. If I needed to paint, or clean
the gutters, I used to squeeze the barberry into a smaller "form"
temporarily by wrapping it in Romex - the wire you find running through the
walls of most houses. If the town ever needed to do whatever towns do to
street signs (like assign 5 guys at $45 per hour to wax it), I'd need a
plant rugged enough to be imprisoned and squeezed like I did with the
barberry.