Have you considered a columnar evergreen?

Compact habit
No leaf litter
Year-round privacy screen

"scfundogs" wrote in message
...
I'm hoping for suggestions from people who know a little about the growth
habits of various tree's root systems.

On one side of my house there are three windows (2 bedrooms & a bathroom)
that have a view of the neighbor's popup camper. The windows are spaced
closely together spanning about 20'.

The neighbor's frog (room over garage) has a straight view into any of my
3
windows. Between the lack of privacy and the ugly view I keep the blinds
closed all the time which is what I'm trying to remedy. There's only
about
10' between my foundation and the prop. line and the neighbor despises
trees
that drop leaves or any other kind of debris. This means anything that I
plant can't have a canopy that will cross the line and leave debris in
their
driveway.

So...I'm looking for a living screen, something to provide privacy for
those
windows but also be pretty for us to look at from inside. It needs to be
either a naturally vertical grower or very acceptable pruning like the
crapemyrtle. I'd prefer it be a very fast grower so I can reap results
more
quickly.

I currently have a bunch of crape myrtles in the yard and I'm close to
planting one in the middle of the 3 windows. The *only* thing stopping
me,
since that tree has everything else I want, is the horizontally spreading
root system. I already have a very mature crapemyrtle planted against
the
front of the house (not by me) that has caused some chimney
foundation/footing damage.

I've been searching online but can't seem to find much information on the
direction roots grow on trees. I find just about everything else I'd need
to know but this one is important. Three trees I've found that I like
visually, and that seem to be able to remain managable in terms of mature
height a

Smoke Tree - Royal Purple
Redbud
Weigela

Unfortunately I don't know about their roots. Any suggestions are
welcome.

--
Tara