Around 2000 (give or take because I cannot remember for sure), I dug up 10 small Magnolia trees from my parents front yard in Chapel Hill, NC and brought them to our home in East Tennessee where I transplanted them... all ten lived and are now about 15-20 feet tall and since I planted them about 10-12 feet apart, they have grown together and formed a privacy fence which was my intent from the beginning. It was also my intent for the trees to be loaded with flowers because my wife loves Magnolia flowers and I wanted her to be able to sit on our back deck and see a wall of white Magnolia flowers which never happened to the extent for which I had hoped; still, looking over at them from our screened-in back porch, I have counted about 30 beautiful flowers this morning.
Some of the trees are wider and taller than others but that does not bother me near as much as the leaves that fall to the ground and have to be constantly mowed up to keep from killing the grass. Our acre of land is slightly sloped from the front to the back as is the land of all our 12 neighbors forming a low but angled area behind all the houses for proper water drainage... which over the last 20 years has worked perfectly. Sometimes, our grass in the back sloping area looks healthier than the grass in our front yard but I suppose that is to be expected as well.
