Columnar plants make great privacy screens,

but they can do more than that.

There's a Eucryphia in my front garden that marks a threshold. You walk past it and you know you've entered somewhere different—the front seating area becomes its own room. It wasn't always doing that job. It grew into it. That's how a lot of these plants work.

Small footprint. Big vertical lift. What you get back depends on where you put it and what you ask it to do—privacy, yes, but also thresholds, rhythm, focal points, anchors.

And everything has its moment. I had an upright Taxus in the front southwest corner for years. Over time, it became less effective as a sentinel. It was getting chubby and out of scale with the space, so I took it out. After I was done, I asked myself what I often do: what took me so long?

That's what this video covers.