I grew a sacred rubber tree once. It corrupted some of the graphics when I got too close to the canopy, but a client restart fixed it.
I did take the precaution of setting it up far from my "base" in that testworld. That helped, no doubt. It also ended up overhanging a taint biome, which just made the dark and spooky area... darker and spookier.
Fast graphics should definitely help. With that enabled (not tested, by me at least) a giant rubber tree *should* be no harder on your client than a giant UFO of solid stone. For the server, on the other hand... yeah, I don't recommend burning it down.