Fast growth is the most requested trait in a landscape and the one with the clearest cost attached.
Plants that grow quickly make lower-density wood, and lower-density wood breaks. That combination is how a shade tree planted for quick results becomes a split trunk in a wind event fifteen years later, and in this valley the wind event always comes. Fast growers also tend to live shorter lives — which is only a problem if somebody expected a permanent tree.
None of that makes them wrong. A screen somebody needs in this decade, a windbreak on acreage, something to hold the space while a slower tree establishes — these are legitimate reasons, and the fast grower is the correct plant for them.
What matters is choosing it knowingly. A fast-growing tree near a house, a drive, a power line or a septic field is a decision that should be made with its mature size and its wood strength on the table. Several of the fastest growers available here are also the ones whose roots find sewer laterals, which is a separate and more expensive problem.
The honest framing is that fast growth buys time and spends durability, and there are places where that trade is worth making and places where it absolutely is not.
