"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
...
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.

It's certainly okay to be constantly trimming the hedge on top. The height
requirement was a minimum, not maximum.

--
W