Yes, Soozd, I do invest my time to try to get design jobs (that means I do not charge for initial meeting). However, that is something that you or I would have to do if we had more inquiries than time to invest. It does weed out some good serious folks among those lighter inquiries, but it leaves ONLY very committed people in the market pool and recovers the expense of dealing with those less serios folks. I did work for a LA/design/build company that had a very high profile garden center on the south shore (MA). We had an average of 30 calls a day in the spring from people who wanted us to come out and meet with them about their landscape. When they were told about the $45 consultation fee, 2/3 of them would not continue. That left 10 calls a day to pursue. Those consultations would last about an hour. We often did quick sketches on site with graph paper and Prismacolor, but you could not keep them or copy them. Then we would go back to the office and write up contracts to either do a simple install or for design. That can take considerable time. While this is going on, we were also doing design work for those who hired us for that, and were were managing the jobs that were being built at the same time. When you consider how long it takes to construct a landscape, usually weeks, it should be clear that there is no possibility of constructing all of the work that is asked about. You would be faced with ways of filtering down the amount of work you do at every stage until it is managable at each of those stages. If not, you'd be faced with having three years of work booked in March. How professional is taking work on that you can not do for three years? That was definitely an extreme case, but that system was perfect for them. I worked for, and continue to do some work for, a very high end company that six to seven digit landscapes. The jobs are big and take months to complete. They do not do a lot of jobs each year because they are large, tightly managed, and involved. They don't advertise in a big way, so the numbers of inquiries are low and generally from sources consistant with the market in which they work. In other words the leads are usually of high quality and there are not many of them. There is no charge to meet with clients, although they are generally extremely wealthy. That works just right for that company. But, if you call from an area inconsistant with the type of work that they do, you will be subtly told to go somewhere else because they value those 5 hours of invested time managing the jobs they have and don't really want to take the work crews off of those higher production jobs to do a less productive job if they were to get it. Again, I don't see why someone can not take the time to do a mass email response to people once a week, or to put a staff member aside a time to return calls. However, you can imagine that each person calling wants to make a case for their job or wants some advice. It is rather difficult to make one of these conversations short without seeming rude. Then you have to do it over and over for each. I think I can empathise with those who will blow some of these off, if they are in big numbers. These are just some reasons why some charge for consults and others do not. Everyone's circumstance is different and it is not all about trying to milk as much money as possible. It is actually a way to manage the office's time by affecting the source of the work instead of the production end of it.

I live in a dry area of southern California but after some moist winters have had plenty of mildew during the following spring on just about every class of rose. When I first grew roses here in an area where no roses had been grown before I had zero disease of any kind for the first two years and after that mildew and then some rust and blackspot began to creep in. It's been increasingly prominent with every year, although never to the degree that some gardeners here have complained of. Ingrid

I think it's very useful information when speaking with people from colder places. They have a completely different routine and their own sense of what their plants need. What works for me might not work for them. I'm lucky enough to find myself here. The only frost around here is in the freezer. The map is from US National Arboretum. Link below. Thanks, Norma! Happy New Year! Here is a link that might be useful: USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

solstice98 and others: Here is another great web site- you can get a list of native species for any Florida county- just click on your county from the map: http://www.fnps.org/pages/plants/landscape_plants.php I will post this on the Florida Gardening site so it does not get lost here from the rest of the Florida gardeners. I just moved here recently and have been trying to transform the exotic garden I moved into to mostly native- so far I've been able to attract Green Anoles, Monarch Butterflies, and Zebra Longwing Butterflies- and I live in Miami!