In article , "Warren"
wrote:

paghat wrote:
The house will be fine.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Everyone plants next to the house.

If everybody jumped off a cliff....

If your siding is wood, anything planted too close to the house will prevent
you from repainting your house.

I have repainted a house that was surrounded by old large shrubs. Anyone
can do it. You tie the shrubs in rope, you pull them forward, you paint
the wall, the next day you let the shrubs pop back where they belong. For
vines, you cut them down, they grow back fine.

Some climbing vines will latch onto the
wood, and may leave the wood too damaged to simply repaint.

Some climbing vines will kill your kids & the dog. It's hardly rational to
therefore never plant vines. What your house is made out of will certainly
help to define what sort of climbing vines are suitable. If it was
inherently harmless, there wouldn't be such a driving market for vines
that do so well climbing on houses. It's standard. It's traditional. All
the great manner houses do it.

Some foliage and
flowers may stain the paint on wood, or aluminum siding, or damage vinyl
siding. Pests can use the plants to get into the siding. And that's just
what can happen above the surface. Below the surface, roots can find cracks,
or even cause cracks, in the foundation.

Humbug. And trees destroy sildewalks, therefore no city should have trees.
A Japanese maple's feeder roots can travel twenty, thirty feet from the
tree, so no one could plant a tree any closer than the next property over,
if destroying the foundation is so likely. Even a moron could figure out
how to do it right. It is paranoid worry warts with excuses like these who
pave over their entire property & paint the concrete green. If you
planted a honey locust one foot from the house, or thirty feet away from
the house, its roots would in either case find the basement, provided the
foundation is already shot to hell. And if live in a butt-ugly aluminum
house, a little pollen isn't going to make it worse.

Your worries are nonsensical if they become excuses not to plant around a
house. If are only sensible if you take such possibilities into
consideration & plant sensibly.

Tell your wife when it comes time to repaint the house, it'll be her
responsibility to paint anyplace where plants are closer than two feet from
the house, and you'll only take care of places with two or more feet of
clearance.

Or just tell your wife "**** off & die, & your little garden too," it
amounts to the same thing. Though that WOULD fit the tone of the original
complaint, to take the approach of making a non-problem into a sound
reason to find a nicer sweety to share one's life with. When a garden
becomes a point of contention with one's spouse, it's a clue the spouse is
a butthead, not that some roots are going to tip the house over.

-paghat the ratgirl
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