"Smitty Two" wrote in message
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the Don't send me any freakin' spam wrote:

I am putting up a fence. A small Dogwood tree is right exactly in line
with
the house where I want the fence to go. I don't really want to chop down
the
tree, so I'm considering running the fence around it. Any creative ideas
how
to do this and make it look good? I'm considering zig/zagging around the
tree but don't want to have to dig 3 or 4 extra holes just to go around
it,
and to angle slightly past it would look funny. The tree is too big to
move,
I don't have the resources to move something that would require that big
of
a rootball to be dug up. Any ideas?

Here's an idea from the landscape design school of thought -- make it
look as though the tree and the fence were planned to intersect right
from the beginning. So stop the fence short of the tree by about three
feet. Continue it on the other side with equal spacing. Then connect the
two fence segments with a semi-circular bench. Dig up the lawn inside
the semi-circle, put in some redwood bark and a couple of ferns or
flowers or other small ornamentals. Even if you never sit on the bench,
when looking out the window at it, it blends the tree and fence together
and looks intentional rather than looking like klutzy poor planning.

(Of course, if your fence has to be continuous for security or pet
containment, that isn't going to work.)

This one gets my vote also

I think I will indeed zig around the tree, and so that it doesn't look
funny, I'll put a bench there. My wife has been wanting a bench, so a bench
against the fence that zigs around the tree will look nicely. One of my
quandraries was how to zig around the tree without it looking funny. Thanks
everyone for your comments!