Are there any other weird birds out there that think about what your new tree planting is going to look like in aerial and satellite imagery, and waste time and mental and physical energy making sure its going to look "right" from 10,000 feet? Then waste more time and energy posting about it?
In case there are, heres the 'alternative method' that I used to plant a couple hundred trees last fall, and the aerial imagery to show the results:

I guess its not that revolutionary, but rather than planting the trees in simple perpendicular and equally spaced rows and columns - this is called square packing, and is the same as the arrangement in a full twelve pack of cans of beer, I used a different layout that places each tree equidistant from each of its neighbors. Its called hexagonal packing, or triangular packing, and its the arrangement you get once you remove one or more of the beers from the twelve pack and the cans settle to their natural state, nestling into the unused spaces between cans.
It gives a slightly higher trees/acres density. Square packing gives a ~78.5% efficiency, and hex packing gives ~90.7%. I planted at 10' spacing, so rather than the 435 trees/acre of square packing, hex packing places about 503 trees in the same space.
I think it looks cool from the aerial, rather that aligning parallel in two directions 90° apart, it aligns parallel in 3 directions, 60° apart. But that wasnt the main reason that I did it.
The main reason was because I would be planting in and around existing trees and patches of plants that I didnt want to clear, and couldnt work through while doing my layout, and I wanted to trees on either side of whatever obstructions to still align with each other, colinear and parallel. The specifics of my method allowed for this.
The Method: Get two rigid pieces of material that are both the length of whatever spacing you want (10'L, 1" PVC tubes in my case). Stick a flag into the ground wherever you want to start. Use your PVC pipe to space a second flag 10' away - this will establish the directions of all of your rows. After that chose any two flags, bump your spacing tubes up to each of them and bring them together to place your next flag. If you are consistent you will have a nearly perfect grid that can work around obstructions and create colinear rows on either side of the obstruction, without using a line of sight. Gluing a small magnet into the end of each tube helps to give consistent contact to the steel wire of the flag. Also a wife and a child to hold the opposite ends of the sticks against flags really speeds things up.
No measurements are required. No eyeball judgments. No measuring right triangles to get things perpendicular or square. Just bump the sticks to flags and keep on going.
The actual 'row spacing' is less than the tree spacing, (87% of the tree spacing) so keep that in mind if you want a certain width for equipment and access.
I tried a similar method before this with strings, ropes, chains, etc, and it gives the same results, but requires a lot of back-and-forth that you can avoid by using the sticks method.
Let me know your thoughts, and how crazy I am for laying out my trees this way.
