over time.. no matter what you do .. a maple will kill everything under it.. they are super competitors.. with a shallow root system that will steal all available nutrients and water ... if you want to garden under trees.. shade gardening... you have the wrong tree ... i can refer you to the hundreds of posts about maples in the hosta forum ... i once .. on a mature tree.. added 2 feet of soil in a raised bed around a 50 foot tree ... within 3 months... you could NOT put a shovel through the added soil as the maple COMPLETELY invaded the new soil ... now i know better.. and it did not kill the tree ... good luck ken

This isn't helpful to you in any way, but I think it is interesting: Several years ago I used to park by an empty lot on the foot of Potrero Hill in SF and I noticed a funny looking shrub starting to grow which i later determined was a Fremontodendron. I'm not sure where it came from as I've not seen any others in the area (unless they are out of sight in back yards) except for one that is rather far away in Golden Gate Park. As far as I know I am outside of the normal native range. Very bad google street view image It has stayed relatively small over the past 5 or 6 years with no one pruning it or watering it, and the soil there is kind of awful (serpentine). Nonetheless it is a fairly striking bush when it flowers.

It's a hybrid between shantung and norway maple. Norway maple is more of invasive tree in certain areas plus they seem to have terrible root system that makes it diffcult to plant anything around it. I'm curious what exactly it is about this hybrid that makes it better than norway and shantung. Shantung maple alone is already a great tree. It's designated as Texas Super star plant (in texas). I think there's only 4 trees on that list.

"The difference between the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Northeast is that the waters off the Atlantic are warmer, since the ocean currents are moving northward, clockwise from the Gulf of Mexico." This is demonstrably not true in winter. It was a hassle to go find to buoy data - but then reading data from obscenely formatted flat files is part of what I do for a living - and comparing a buoy a similar distance off Massachusetts and Port Orford, OR, the Oregon buoy is about 2C warmer in January. As would be expected. In the very coldest winters ever, the Atlantic coast has frozen as far south as Virginia Beach, VA! Pray tell if you've known of that happened at remotely similar latitudes along the Pacific coast! "This paradoxically leads to colder winters, because the rising warm air off the ocean leads to storm systems that can pull in air from further north" Eh, no. The periodic incursions of very cold air into the northeastern USA actually have more to do with conditions in the Pacific, which is why their frequency is influenced by the ENSO. Their overall capriciousness is influenced by the lack of geographic factors that keep winters in Eastern Asia so generally stable by creating a semi-permanent Siberian high. You will never hear of Beijing getting 2 ft. of snow in a 'northeaster', (東北風暴 LOL) and cities in inland China at the same latitude and elevation of Atlanta have winters that are USDA zone 9b or 10a instead of 7b or 8a. As Atlanta would if it were not for those periodic cold outbreaks that plague most of the CONUS to varying degrees. (no pun intended!) The ocean current from the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf Stream and mostly turns away from the US around North Carolina. Northeast coast is just about as influenced by cold Labrador current. Not that it matters, anyhow...even if the Gulf Stream headed straight for Maine, it isn't as though the climate of Boston would magically become like Sydney, or even Seattle. Unless we remove most of Canada from the face of the Earth and convert it into an ocean LOL. The main difference between climate of the US PNW and northeast is explained by their relative positions on a continent of a planet where mid-latitude winds are westerly - the same factor explaining the differences between western Europe and Siberia, as well as differences between more benign climates like Perth and Sydney, and Cape Town and Durban.