On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 07:43:35 -0500, Cheryl Isaak wrote:
On 11/5/11 5:42 PM, Kay Lancaster wrote:

I'm honestly not sure what kind of popular they - they were growing wild
here when I built the house and do provide shelter for the birds in
their crowns.

Everything is in what I call my copse - a smallish area of trees we
didn't take down when we built to screen the house from the road. There
are white pines, birches, oaks, hazelnuts and other naturally occurring
growth

Except for the so-called tulip poplar (a magnolia relative, not a poplar
at all (and you do have them in NH), most of the poplar species you've got
up there don't live long. Some, like quaking aspen, tend to be clonal,
and you'll get sprouts all over the yard when they come down. It might be
good to figure out what you've got, and if it tends to send up sprouts when
the parent trees are damaged. If so, I'd recommend ringing the bark on the
remaining trees and letting them starve their root systems to death over the
next several years while you replace them with longer lived or more desirable
species for next to a road. When choosing trees, it's also useful to look
up --- here in Oregon, we live with trees heavily butchered for power line
clearance, a sad sight indeed for a mighty old oak or a flat-topped doug
fir.

Since you seem to be interested in wildlife gardening and want to keep some
privacy from the road (our house is set up like that, too), you might want
to consider underplanting with shrubs and vines with good wildlife value, and
choosing a couple of replacement trees with those in mind.

New Hampshire's Extension service, Fish & Game dept and Audubon all have
nice sections on choosing plants for wildlife value.

Me, I'm still working on the bitter cherry, English ivy and Himalayan
blackberry that came with the place... some days, I even think I'm winning.

Kay