Whole Foods in Clear Lake? FINALLY?!

The rumors have floated around for years, but they seem to be getting stronger these days.  I heard the most definite word on the street about two weeks ago (as definite as any word on the street could be), but thus far there doesn't seem to be any official announcement, and there has been no official press coverage (or even rumors in the press that I can find). 

As of this morning, the Facebook group had 3,521 likes.   Screengrabbed from Facebook. 

I can't reveal my rumor source because it came second-hand through semi-professional channels and also because it might be just a flat-out rumor and it's not proper to associate any given entity with rumors (not to mention it's a potential liability). 

The rumor says the store is going to be located "by Baybrook".  Searching the internet, I did indeed find historical references to a proposed Baybrook area location:

Screengrabbed from a Google search referencing this HAIF thread.  HAIF is often a good source of general community intelligence.  However, that particular thread dates back to 2007 and obviously nothing has happened since then. 

What gives extra credence to this Whole Foods rumor at this time is the undeniable fact that Clear Lake's abysmal grocery store situation is now at a tipping point.  On August 1, The Fresh Market announced a location to be developed in Webster; Houston Chronicle picked up on this press release just yesterday.  Often times what happens is that one gourmet grocer makes its move into a new area, and others begin following like lemmings.  To say the same thing in more technical terms, generally this indicates that the tide has finally turned and market studies are now suggesting that Clear Lake has, indeed, grown to the point where it can profitably support higher-end grocers. 

So fingers crossed, and I will report more news if it becomes available. 

Landscaping around utility boxes and lines

They are uglier than sin and often a major thorn in the side of any landscape plan.

Three car lateral garage with that kind of architectural detailing in Florida?  That might be a half-million-dollar house in the background, but I'd wager that this eyesore skims ten or twenty grand off its perceived market value.

Screengrabbed from this site. 

Not much better. 

Screengrabbed from this site. 

There are a few creative (but usually expensive) commercial solutions on the market...

Some of these artificial rock covers such as this one from Brookstone appear to be high quality and are convincing to the eye - but unfortunately, they have high prices to match (generally $250 - $500 apiece!).   

Occasionally, some DIYer will hit a customized solution out of the park...

This is a screengrab from a post aptly titled "Genius Idea of the Week" by www.cloverandvine.com, but I can only access a cached image right now. 

...and similarly, there's always room for art:

Love it!!  But it's beyond the reach of most ordinary mortal homeowners. 
Screengrabbed from this site, which also will only load cached images today. 

In the series of photos below, I'll show you how we landscaped around our utility boxes.  We didn't just disguise them - we made the area very productive, to the point where it's paying us back for our investment.

Here are the ugly little buggers prior to the construction of our house...

...and here is the same area while construction was in progress.  Note two things here:  (1) My next-door neighbor didn't fare much better, as he ended up with a pad-mounted transformer in his portion of the easement.  And (2) the microscopic quality of our Centerpointe back yards becomes obvious here, as you can see just how far that house in the background extends toward the back fenceline, which is barely visible at photo right.  Their back yard at that point is probably less than 20 feet deep.  Probably smaller than their living room, in other words. 

Because of that microscopic quality of this back yard, I was not content to simply throw up a few bushes around these boxes and call it a done day.  I couldn't afford to lose the productivity of this space.

Ours is a particularly gruesome easement, because it wasn't encumbered by just one utility line - it has three (gas in yellow, electric in red, and fiber optic cable in orange).  And furthermore, those lines extended well beyond the trench established for the boxes, which thankfully were pushed up close to the back fence. 

The yellow arrows point to the same two boxes, which are partially obscured by the nursery containers. 

This is a very important thing to remember when you're dealing with landscaping in utility easements: Those utility boxes you see in your yard are just the barest tip of the iceberg.  There's all kinds of additional inconvenient crap going on beneath your lawn.  That photo above was from this post in which I talked about the importance of using utility locator services (Texas 811 in our case) before working around these things. 

You might look at all that nasty spray paint above and conclude that there isn't much hope for landscaping in this particular area of our yard.  But this is what that same painted corner looks like today:

Anything you plant in a utility easement is subject to being ripped out by the utility company if they ever have to work on their underground lines.  Partially for that reason, most of my landscaping assets in this area are "floating" rather than rooted.  I did add four POH Yaupon bushes directly in front of the boxes to hide them.  But I took the whole scheme much further than a simple vegetation screen.  I added two oblong stock tanks for vegetable gardening.  You can only see one of them here, because the POH hedge hides the other (I love those livestock tanks but at the same time, I didn't want the back yard to look like a metal factory).  The one visible stock tank floats directly over the buried electrical cable that runs to the right-of-way to power a street light. 

I had multiple reasons for using livestock tanks for vegetable gardening.  In this post, I talked about the importance of keeping our food-growing enterprises elevated, because our dog has to go potty in this microscopic back yard.  I also want to grow organically, and isolating the garden soil helps to control both chemistry and insect access. 

But in this particular corner of the yard, it was also essential that I have the ability to pick up the gardens and move them if the utility company needs to do any digging.  POH's are tougher than nails and can easily recover if they ever needed to be replanted, so basically there's nothing here that would get destroyed by a utility dig. I'd just have to move it all out of the way temporarily.  Given that I have no problem with soil back-loading, this wouldn't be a problem.

The second stock tank is sitting against the boxes, but not pushing on them.  The boxes are now sandwiched between the stock tank and the POH. 

I left good clearance around the electrical access in case the linemen ever needed to get at it.



Something else to keep in mind:  If you work around these things in your yard, be very careful about the potential for exposed lines.  Lines and cables are not supposed to be left above ground, but they sometimes are, as installers (who usually get paid by the job, not the hour) cut corners on installation.  See what the yellow arrow is pointing to?  I know from experience (insert long story here) that this is my next-door neighbor's cable TV line which the installation subcontractor did not bother to bury in a trench.  So I have to remain aware not to accidentally cut that thing (again) as I'm working in this area.  If one of us raised a stink with Comcast, we could probably force them to bury it as they should have originally.  But I don't want contractors messing with my area here, so I just watch out for it myself.

Those two little stock tanks have been my most productive gardens when evaluated on a per-square-foot basis:

Over two thousand cherry tomatoes last year.  Chart from this post. 

My costs for landscaping that utility-encumbered corner of the yard were approximately as follows:

• Two Behlen Country oblong stock tanks -  $250.
• Four POH Yaupons on clearance at Lowes - $120
• Pavers to support stock tanks - about $60
• Stock tank soil and amendments - about $50
• Mulch - about $30
• Edging stone (multi-blend four-inch) - about $100 (stone is obscenely expensive in greater Houston because of the transportation costs - it has to be trucked in from hundreds of miles away). 
• One small sage bush - about $10
• TOTAL:  Approximately $620 (all labor was DIY)
• Offset value of food harvested to date from these tanks: At least $150
• NET TOTAL: About $470, and continuing to drop as more vegetables are harvested.

Look again at what is achieved for that investment.  Do you think this raises my property value by at least $500?  I suspect the answer is yes. 

I've planted tomatoes again this spring.  You can see them coming up in both tanks.  Last summer it was okra. 

 Because I cook and freeze food in large volumes, I can really leverage the value of harvested food.  Last year's two thousand tomatoes formed a wicked-good base for a lot of spaghetti sauce, chili, and other dishes.  I put the off-set costs above just in case that kind of thing is important to some readers.  I garden as a hobby and I'm less concerned with pay-back, but when I start working the pay-back numbers, I'm always surprised at how high they are. 


The organic versions of these cute little hot-house packages are extremely expensive - about four dollars apiece.  Imagine how many of these could be filled by a harvest of two thousand tomatoes. 

Screengrabbed from this site.

What he said.  Or in my case, I get tomatoes.  Lots and lots of tomatoes. 

Meme source unknown and uncreditable, but here's Ron Finley's site.

So there are some of my ideas for maximizing the beauty and productivity of space around utility boxes and above buried utility lines.  Happy landscaping. 

And oh - if you've got the time for it, here is Ron's latest TED talk.  While not aimed at a typical affluent suburban scenario such as we have here, his gardening and food management ideas are universal.  Dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks, indeed. 

Unsupervised children overpower helpless dog

A roving band of children cornered and seriously entertained a loose dog yesterday in the League City, Texas suburban neighborhood of Centerpointe.

It is suspected that the children were between six and nine years old.

Neither the dog nor the children were subject to any obvious control or supervision by hovering adults at the time of the incident.

The dog was rendered blissfully passive as she was alternately rubbed, scratched, and petted.

Witnesses report that the children and the dog also spent close to an hour engaging in games of chase and fetch within the public right of way, also without direct adult intervention, and without the dog being leashed.  The children had no prior knowledge of the dog's training or temperament, but successfully negotiated the play interaction with the animal despite this limitation, as evidenced by their constant screams of delight.  The witnesses refused to identify themselves for fear of social, legal, or regulatory reprisal. 

It is believed that no similar incidence of spontaneous, unchoreographed play has occurred anywhere in League City since approximately 1984, prior to the time when stranger danger paranoia swept American society. 

In the intervening years, normal children's activity has become increasingly criminalized, as evidenced by the case of the Virginia mother who was interrogated repeatedly by police for allowing her children to play unsupervised within their own yard. 

Much closer to home, a La Porte, Texas mother recently made national news when she was arrested and jailed for allowing her two children to play unsupervised on their suburban street despite her defense that she was, in fact, visually monitoring her children from her position in a lawn chair that may have been situated out of the public's direct line of sight.  Her children are the same ages as the children depicted above, and La Porte is located just sixteen miles from League City.

What prompted yesterday's bold demonstration of trust and affection is not known.  However, greater Houston's primary English language commercial news network, local ABC affiliate KTRK-TV, recently distinguished itself by documenting the "free range" parenting movement and showcasing with actual statistics the degree to which "stranger danger" fears are unfounded, and follow-up reporting by independent sources emphasized these facts.  It is possible that some local parenting attitudes are quietly evolving in the face of this compelling information.

League City police are not investigating yesterday's incident. 

Neither the children nor the dog were harmed during the event, although the dog's owners now wonder if her future expectations for affection will become a bit over-inflated. 

The Sky is Blue, Part 2: Painting the kitchen skylight

(Last updated August 11, 2013)  Back in May of this year, I published this post describing the process I went through to zero in on the best color for our outdoor patio ceiling. 

At that time, I hinted that there would be a "Part 2" to this ceiling-painting endeavor (and that's an endeavor without a "u", instead of with a "u").  Part 2, "where the men get separated from the boys".

I will admit straight up that this skylight painting project was not my creative idea.  I've also mentioned in the past that I'm an absolute HGTV junkie...

This is an actual photograph of our TV itself, obviously from the HGTV show Kitchen Cousins, which is a kitchen make-over series.  How wonderful for us that DirecTV can be paused like this, because that's how I scrapbook many of the design ideas that interest me: I sit there with a camera and take pictures of the television set.  My teenager says that I'm far too eccentric.  I'm old enough not to care.

I was immediately drawn to the impact of the skylight in the photo above.  It just glows.  This is the effect that I wanted to duplicate in our home.  Our issue came down to the following:  we chose an unusual but popular Meritage plan that has the kitchen in the absolute center of the house, instead of on one of the exterior walls, which is the case with most house designs (including the one shown above, which is unusual in having a kitchen sink window AND a skylight).  Because our kitchen has no windows, we ordered a big wide skylight option much like this one.  And our skylight turned out OK, but it didn't have much visual impact in its original "builder-basic" form.

It's fairly unremarkable, isn't it??  Gives some feeling of weightiness being lifted off the head, but really no WOW-factor here.

So this was my challenge:  duplicate the impact of the HGTV example above in our space, which was quite, quite different in terms of color scheme and geometry. 

Men from the boys.  There was not a single fifty-dollar home improvement project I've ever done that was anywhere near to being as challenging as this one proved to be.  Converging on exactly the right shade of blue came down to an almost scientific process that went something like this series of steps below.

Have you ever noticed that just the right shade of aqua/turquoise can have tremendous WOW-factor?  Such as this art glass piece in a fancy hotel as photographed by Lloyd Edwards (image screengrabbed from this site).

That visual impact occurs most impressively when the shade of aqua is on the opposite side of the color wheel from the orangey wood tones that are together with it in the same room.

Here's an image of a color wheel screengrabbed from this HGTV site.  Do you see how the blues are opposite the oranges?  That is extremely important for the analysis below.

In order to go via process of elimination to constrain the right shade of blue for our kitchen skylight, we first had to find the formula for the color that was essentially the opposite of our kitchen cabinets, which are a spice-colored maple, and which supply a lot of the kitchen's color due to their sheer number.

This is how our cabinetry appears when photographed without using the camera flash.  This is fairly true-to-life.

According to a color-wheel calculation software that my husband located on the internet, this is the color-wheel-opposite to the cabinet photo above.

Just to bracket the range of possibilities, this is what the same cabinet looks like when photographed with the camera flash on. This is much more yellowish than how it appears in real life.

And this is the blue shade that was calculated as being opposite the camera flash option.

So those two shades gave me a rough idea of what the final product was supposed to look like. 

August 11, 2013:  There's now a cool app that can help with that sort of determination. 

Go to this site and play around with it if you're trying to constrain colors. 

Screengrabbed from Color Scheme Designer.

The rest, unfortunately, became a difficult task of largely trial and error.  Remember, there are multiple independent variables involved with a color choice - hue, saturation, lightness, intensity, value... this stuff is tough if you're not an expert at it, which I certainly am not...

...and of course, daylight conditions varied substantially as seen down the skylight, even as I was trying to choose the paint.  Meritage painted it a flat off-white color, and so it was also fairly dark to start with because of the low reflectivity of the light-absorbing paint.  Here you can see some of my initial paint tester shades added at photo left, but it's really too dark to tell much of anything here.

Here is a clearer view so you can see some of the tester trials.  I could immediately see that all of these were too dark (saturated), although the samples to the left were starting to get toward the proper hue.  And the greener tones were just not right.

Aaaaand even more samples.  Finding the right color literally took me the better part of a week's worth of free time.  I went through between ten and twenty different tester shades and had to make multiple trips to Lowe's hardware store because each time I thought I had finally zero'd in on it, I'd get the paint home and find out it was wrong for the space. 

You can also see in this pic that I'm switching to a satin paint from Meritage's original flat paint.  This was to increase the reflectivity and the resulting brightness of the skylight. 

All this fussing around did finally pay off as we hit the proverbial jackpot in a Valspar shade called "Sweetleaf".

I almost did not buy an 8-ounce tester of "Sweetleaf" because it looked far too green to me in the store and on the chip card... isn't a "leaf" supposed to be green rather than blue??  And I thought I was looking for a blue.  Here it is above as screengrabbed from this site. 

And here it is as screengrabbed from the Lowe's site.  But paint shades as seen on a fan deck don't necessarily bear any resemblance to what they look like once they are up on the wall.

And here is what that very same shade looks like up in our skylight.  Hard to comprehend, eh??  Nobody was more surprised than WE were!!


You are probably sitting there thinking,
"She is just plain wrong.  She mixed up her colors."

But I have the half-empty paint can sitting beside me as I type this post.
:-)

The best I can tell you is this: 

Painting a skylight is not like painting any other surface of your home - especially if your skylight is a massive shaft ten feet in length up through the very center of the house, as ours is.  If you remember your high school science, what this means is that the light coming down that shaft is largely polarized, which can drastically affect how colors manifest.  We noticed right away that the paint as applied seemed to immediately resonate and self-amplify, particularly because it was a semi-shiny satin - it reflected light back upon itself to intensify its own blue tones.  I've never seen this happen to this degree in any painting project before (but I've never painted the inside of a shaft before).

Just in case your mind is not totally blown at this point, THAT is the very same paint in the roller tray immediately prior to me applying it to the sides of the skylight.  To our naked eyes, the paint itself appeared almost pure white.  The tiniest hint of green can be seen in this open paint can beside the tray.  A hint of minty green similar to the Valspar paint samples shown in the screengrabs above.

But hey, despite this counterintuitive solution to our color predicament, the results have been simply awesome.

The shade of blue created is constantly changing depending on the angle of the sun, the amount of cloud cover in the sky, and the time of year!

We never get tired of being surprised by whichever color is going to appear next.  It's more fun than watching TV!  It literally ranges from aqua to baby blue to navy blue to various shades of off-white and gray.

In the evening as the sun lowers in the sky, there is a mysterious subtle glow that reminds me of Cherenkov radiation.

Look again at the initial pre-painting view of this same skylight:

Blah.

There's simply no comparison.  I've never done any other home improvement project that resulted in  this magnitude of visual impact.  Our whole kitchen now comes alive in a vibrant new way. 

Anyway, in summary, should you be one of those intrepid souls who is intent on finding just the right color for your skylight, my advice is this:  just keep trying and trying until you find the shade that suits your particular room configuration and lighting conditions.  Done correctly, the final result is more than worth all the effort and energy that it might take to get there. 
:-)


Landscaping Made Easy, Part 7: Pyramidal holly cultivars

This post is one in a series intended to provide some landscaping ideas for Centerpointe residents who may wish to improve their back yard privacy and resulting property values, but who may not know which plants would be best suited to our upper Texas near-coastal climate and our tiny back yards.

***
REVISION:  This post was revised a day after initial publication following receipt of additional information about the cultivar in question. 

The tag line for this entry should be "Other Peoples' Plants".  This is the first time I'm diverting from my own landscaping assemblage in order to describe another Centerpointe resident's yard - one that I really think represents a wonderful job - easy, dramatic impact, zero maintenance, not overdone, and effective for privacy. 

Just look at the impact as seen from the yard behind it:

Let's first look at the yard in which I was standing when I took this pic.  I bet you winced and said "Yuck!!" upon seeing this totally non-cozy yard in the foreground here.  Someone took the time and money to put in a nice pool - but only half-did the job, leaving that pool garnished with only two exposed utility boxes and one hell of an ugly fence.  Would you really want to swim with nothing but a hulking transformer staring at you?  Doesn't that conjure up images of water-borne electrocution?  I've seen Motel 6 pools that look more inviting than this.

And yes - arguably this property in the foreground went for a low price the last time it sold (I know these buyers so I know what they paid).  With a back yard that looks like that, what could those previous sellers have realistically expected in the way of a sale here??  They took a financial hit, by their own faults.  And that then translated into a comparable sale ("comp") that reinforced lower property values for the rest of us. 

Now look at the yard behind the one in which I'm standing.  Look at those trees!!  WOW!!!!  What a contrast!!

I was so impressed with those trees that I went to this adjacent owner, knocked on their front door, and said, "Hi!! I'm your nosy neighborhood blogger!  Can you please tell me what cultivar is in your back yard??"

Unfortunately for me, the current owners were not the original owners who had put in this landscaping, and they did not know what kind of tree that is. 

It seems almost certain that at least two of the three trees visible in the photo above are holly cultivars.

It's got the characteristic leaf shape and bright red berries.

I originally thought that these were Foster's holly (Ilex x attenuata 'fosteri'). 

Smaller examples of Foster's holly
screengrabbed from this Auburn University website. 

But judging by the photographs above, Daniel at Maas Nursery in Seabrook suggests that they are Savannah holly (Ilex x attenuata 'Savannah').  So apparently I was correct on the species but not the cultivar (according to USDA, there are 39 holly species grown in America, but their system doesn't immediately account for different cultivars). 

Savannah holly pic screengrabbed from the cache of an expired domain name.  I thought this was an interesting pic because the guy is holding a measuring stick to emphasize just how tall they are.  And yet they are not very wide or heavy, which makes them great options for Centerpointe.  Furthermore if you look at that example at photo right, it looks like they will display nice straight trunks should you decide to "raise their skirts" (prune them up). 

This Forest Service Fact Sheet says that Savannah holly can get 30 to 45 feet tall, but only 6 to 10 feet wide.  That makes them very suitable for a small yard.  For comparison, the average Centerpointe two-story home is probably between 25 and 35 feet high at the roof peak.  That means that Savannah holly would be on scale with the closely-spaced houses, without growing into huge dominating things that would not look right in our restricted yard areas. 

Other internet resources note that they can add about 3 feet per year in height.  This is something that residents may want to contemplate if they are inclined to conclude, "Oh, we've only lived here for two years, so we haven't gotten around to planting anything in our yard yet."  If this tree were your choice, with two years of inactivity, you'd be forfeiting about six feet of gain on a tree that you might install at six to ten feet of height to start with.  Two years of planting inactivity therefore means the difference between "privacy" and "no privacy" in your back yard. 

Back to this Centerpointe example property.  This previous owner knew what they were doing when they developed their backyard landscaping plan:

Note that there's a long shadow being cast by the deck canopy (white object) such that the back yard looks shallower than it actually is.  These trees only consume about 20% of the available space, leaving a very open feel even while establishing a privacy screen and adding considerable dimension and interest.

Note also that this previous owner did not spend a lot of money or create a big maintenance headache for themselves here.  These trees aren't even set in mulch beds.  Furthermore, they are evergreen, so no big leaf-raking burden. 

Screengrab from Googlemaps.

As for sourcing information for Savannah holly, Maas Nursery does report that they have them in stock, as well as similar cultivars such as East Palatka holly and Nellie R. Stevens holly.  I found a listing for the latter at Lowes hardware store, but remember that if you shop sales, you can often do considerably better than regular retail prices.  I will try to find additional sourcing information for these things in the near future. 

Same Centerpointe hollies as seen from a different angle.
Note that you don't totally have to create a solid imposing "wall" of trees in order to achieve the desired "living fence" effect of dimension, vertical impact, and privacy. 

Landscaping Made Easy, Part 2: Italian Cypress

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

Except for maybe thy neighbor's Italian cypress trees?  Probably no harm in coveting them, because everybody else does!!
:-)

I ranked Texas wax myrtle as my favorite landscape plant for Centerpointe because of its intended-size versatility on small subdivision lots, because it grows so fast, and because of its hardiness (it's native, drought tolerant, and almost cannot be killed by neglect). 

However, I did note that wax myrtle is more of a utilitarian tree / shrub than a real showpiece.  If you want a real "bling" show-stopper tree on a small lot, your choice might be Italian cypress.  I have gotten more compliments on our increasingly-majestic Italian cypress trees than on any other element of our landscape design.  They grow UP instead of OUT, which makes them particularly well-suited for tight spaces. 

And they also grow UP very quickly:

This is what three of our current six looked like the day they went into the ground (I say "three of our current six" because I fully intend to plant more in the future). 

You can see underground utility lines marked on the ground in orange paint.  Our yard, like just about every yard in Centerpointe, has a utility easement in the back yard.  Anything planted in such an easement is planted at the homeowner's risk, which was my motivation for making sure that these trees were planted on either side of the existing lines, rather than right on top of them (such a strategy is not a guarantee of no future disturbance, but it might work to my advantage in helping to preserve the trees at some point in the future if the utility companies need to access these lines... bear in mind that if the lines DO need to be accessed, it will likely be many years into the future, so even if I lose a few trees and shrubs, we'll get to enjoy them in the meantime). 

I have a separate post detailing how to deal with utility easements. 

Here's what they look like about eighteen months after planting:

Look at how much the little ones in particular have grown in such a short time.  They looked like toothpicks when I first put them in.

Bear in mind that this growth also took place during one of the worst droughts in recorded history.  We put six Italian cypress into the ground; five survived last summer.  I did water them regularly, but special care is really only needed for the first year or two until their roots get established, because Italian cypress is impressively drought-tolerant.  My husband and I were amazed to see this tree positively flourishing in Presidio, a west-Texas desert city which has an annual rainfall of about eleven inches (compared to the normal forty-five inches or so that we have here in League City). 

When is the last time these guys have likely seen any TLC?!

Screengrab of a Presidio street scene from Googlemaps.

Another example of Italian cypress life in the desert, the land where lawns do not exist. 

Much closer to home, here is that group of Italian cypresses on State Highway 96 at the train bridge.  Some of them look ragged at this point, but you have to remember that they never received a drop of water for months and months last year, while at the same time enduring about a hundred days of 100-ish degree weather.  Those were unprecedented extreme conditions that took a terrible toll on every kind of landscaping.  The fact that these survived at all, apparently unassisted, is a testimony to their strength. 

Now, you may be wondering about the cost of these things, and also how to get them home if you are installing them DIY. 

Part of my purpose in writing these posts is to demonstrate that cost is not an excuse for not installing landscaping.  Again, we bought our cypress trees in the autumn, when the nearby Houston Garden Center has its annual 70% off sale.  That means we paid about $30 for each of the smaller (six-foot) cypresses, and $100 apiece for our two largest (12-foot) ones.  And you can see how nice the $30 ones look just 18 months after installation.

Thirty bucks?!  How could you possibly do better than thirty bucks apiece for starter trees that quickly become majestic?! 

This is another reason why I'm not concerned about the future potential for loss if the utility companies need to dig in our backyard easement.  I paid so little for most of this stuff and I get to enjoy it between now and whenever.  If some of it is eventually killed by utility work, I'm not going to lose a big financial investment.

And not only that, the little ones can be taken home in the back of a minivan or pick-up truck - you don't even have to pay for delivery if you're DIY-ing.  The big ones may be a bit more of a challenge...

For about $20, you can rent a trailer from that U-haul place that's a stone's throw from Centerpointe.  We did this because we simultaneously were hauling large Texas wax myrtles.

Check and verify that they still have trailers for rent.  I believe this is where we rented the one we used.

There's another option for these trees: dense planting for privacy screens.  We don't yet see this practice very much in Texas, but it's been popular in California for years:

Very tasteful integration of a privacy screen, from http://www.norcaltreeandstump.com/before-and-after-3.php

Speaking of the local Houston Garden Center, obviously if you wait until their annual fall sale, you won't be getting the pick of the litter on many plants.  If you want to guarantee that you'll get what you want, the time to buy is at the top of the season, which is right now.  It's neat to go over there and simply walk around - last week the smell of all their roses was just amazing.

The other local horticultural outlets that I enjoy are as follows:

• Maas Nursery.  It's top-notch in terms of quality and is not a "big box" style establishment, so you'll pay for that quality, but wow, what an experience just to walk around in the place.  I tend to buy a lot of smaller specialty items at Maas.  They have good prices and unbeatable selection on hanging baskets and patio plants, for instance (often $15 - $25 apiece for really large, unusual centerpiece-type plants that are difficult to find in big-box stores). 
• Caldwell's Nursery.  This is the best one I've seen overall in greater Houston, but you have to drive to Rosenberg to visit it.  They specialize in bamboo, about which I'll post at a later date. 

So there you have my opinions on, and experiences with, Italian cypress.  Happy planting.
:-)

For sale to good homes needing wonderful landscaping.