Higgs Boson wrote:

Hi, W. You might want to look further Oleander can be lethally
poisonous. There are MANY sites on-line that detail the risks. I
once had a tenant who asked me to remove the oleander in his yard,
for fear of a child or an animal being harmed.

HB

Many sites on-line pass on this supposed risk. Oleander is poisonous that's
true but it isn't that much risk because you would have to really work at it
to ingest enough to get sick much less dead. How you would get an animal or
child to eat enough of this bad-tasting woody stuff to be dangerous is never
explained. Then there are the stories of the BBQ made with oleander wood
where everybody gets sick. Those who are so careless to make a fire and
cook food on it with any material at hand without being sure of the
consequences have plenty of opportunities to Darwin themselves (and their
neighbours) out of the population aside from growing oleanders. If you want
to remove every risk from your garden then you have much work to do.

On a more practical level, the requirement to be dense and fast growing but
to stop growing at a certain height may not be possible. If you have a
shrub or bushy tree that meets the first two you are likely to be trimming
it frequently to keep it at the height you want. The height a hedge grows
to depends on its genetics and the local conditions not the figure you had
in mind when you planted it.

D