Unsightly growths in your front yard

We bought a house last May. Talk about a project to last a lifetime - there is never a dull moment around here. We've done a ton of inside work this winter in terms of getting stuff up on the walls, arranging furniture, switching over from oil to gas heating, insulating the attic and installing drop-down stairs, etc., etc. Just a couple more months to go before we can pop the screens back in the windows and start getting outside again.

Last summer was downright manic with all the outdoor projects we tackled. We'd get the kids down at like 6:30 and then work outside with the baby monitor on until 9. The big stuff included putting a fence in the front of the house, establishing a veggie plot with anti-bunny fencing (they ate right through it), starting new garden beds, and creating a woodchipped play area under a cluster of maple trees for all the plastic crapola (slides, sand tables, ride-on toys) that inevitably comes along with kids.

Plans are already underway to continue the bonanza this coming summer with a few new projects. The first one on our list is to fence and screen the sides of the house so the backyard is more private and secure. I want to be able to personally threaten those bunnies getting into the vegetable garden without worrying that kids are running around to the front of the house (we live on a busy road).

Along with the side fence, we'd like to put in some sort of tree or shrub to give the backyard a little privacy from the road and sidewalk. There are tons of options out there for screen plants, but the most popular ones are the evergreen arborvitae trees:

They're tall and skinny and provide a screen year-round. Just one little problem:

WHAT IS THAT?!

Oh yeah. They have to be wrapped in burlap each winter to protect them from deer and rabbit grazing as well as snow fall which could damage the branches. Minor inconvenience, right? While everyone else is putting up their holiday lights, you get to drag the ladder over to your needy screen plants and delicately wrap them up in blankets. And it doesn't stop there. Then you get to tie strings around the entire tree, creating unfortunate bulges that evoke the worst of the low-rise-jean-muffin-top phenomenon. How humiliating!

I think we're going to skip over these and keep looking for the perfect screen plant - preferably one that doesn't require a special cloak in the winter months. Because it seems to me that all your efforts to create a screen would only backfire as people literally gawk from their cars getting a load of your yard's unsightly growths. Instead of gaining precious privacy, you've just converted your property into Dr. Seuss habitat.