Hello all you excellent experts. I need a little advice. First, I would like to identify two trees I have. I can get pretty close, but I'm not sure how to be exact. (These trees were here when we bought our house.) The first is a cherry tree. How do I know if the cherries are edible? (Other than feeding them to my children and waiting to see!) The second tree is one of those annoying flowering pears. Bradford, Cleveland, how can I tell?

Which brings me to the second question. I have a great old house (built in 1924) with a huge old oak tree, and beautiful LARGE redbud and dogwood in the front yard, in addition to that cherry tree. However, about 5 years ago (before we moved in) they started building a subdivision behind our house. They ran water lines through my backyard raised the back of the yard, sort of leveled it out and left an empty yard with one stupid Pear in the middle. Now we would like to plant some trees and start the long process of amending the soil and planting gardens. I would like a mixture of large shade trees and smaller ornamentals. I purchased a red maple and a jane magnolia today to get started. My question is, should we take out the pear or just wait for it to fall down. It's in the center of the yard and won't hit the house, fence, or anything else if it were to fall. But in making my landscape plans I just can't decide how I feel about it. Also, my yard is 48' by 60' and I have 4 kids so I want shade, but I also want room for them to play. I would love to have a huge old Southern Magnolia, but I'm not sure if it would be too big, and I'm concerned that I may be a bit too far north. Any thoughts?

Thanks to any thoughts you all may have to any of these many questions!