What not to plant

I left the big holly on the side of my house alone this spring when I trimmed back my bushes, because it was flowering and swarming with bees. After that, I was too sick to get it done, and so it became badly overgrown. The AC guy came the other day, because my downstairs AC wasn't working, and said they needed to check the unit for coolant leaks, but that I'd have to trim back the holly before he did it, because he couldn't get at the unit. I've been trimming back this sucker for an hour now, using clippers, hand clippers and a saw. It was literally twenty feet high in places, and I had to really massacre it on the side, because it was impossible to make the AC accessible otherwise.

The moral of this is, don't just buy cute little plants at your local garden center and plop them down anywhere. Read the label and see how big they're going to get before you plant them. A shrub that will grow to twenty or thirty feet high has no business being planted a foot and a half away from your air conditioning unit!