Your welcome :) I guess my head is still in school even on spring break. They drill that scientific name stuff in our brains ya know! LOL!! Around here they are all commonly called either for all of them. No matter they are ALL species of Viola. I have Viola tricolor (Johnny Jump-up). By summer here they are fading away. They re-seed and bloom in fall/spring and sometimes they last longer then that if they are getting some protection from surrounding plants during the hottest part of the year. I'm sure there are some species that hold up better than others. Panola is a new one for me, but seems they've been around since at least 1999....looks like OSU did a trial on these in 2004-2005 I wonder what their results were? We just do Poinsetta trias where I go to school. MSU recommends them as a fall annual for Oct-Nov. Now the seed company who bred them (PanAmerican Seed) says they are just Viola x Wittrockiana...this tells me they improved on certain plants from this hybrid species to come up the the Panola series. I wonder how some hybrids come true from seed? Anyways it seems that the original poster (better quit hi-jacking this thread!LOL) has perfect weather conditions for best display ...so I'm still betting on a crown or root rot. The only thing I would suggest is plant something else that is more resistant in this location and try planting the Viola in another spot and see if this makes a difference. Vera Here is a link that might be useful: PanAmerican Seed

Hearing about all of this abundance of butterflies this year makes me really glad that my false nettle is doing well and that I planted lots of violas. When I planted violas last year, the VFs seemed to really like the flowers the best (over the leaves), so I hardly got to see my beautiful flowers anyway. lol I haven't seen any VFs yet this year, but I've seen Red Admirals flying around and one was hanging around the False Nettles, so I suspect that I have some eggs on them. Yesterday I had a Question Mark lay eggs on the two small hackberry trees that I have in 3-gallon pots. I haven't seen any Monarchs yet, but I don't have any of my tropical milkweed planted outside yet and now we're supposed to have showers for the next few days, so I probably won't get around to planting some until this weekend at the earliest. I saw that the Wild Indigo Duskywings and Clouded Sulphurs were busy laying eggs on the Baptisia australis and Lupinus perennis. This butterfly season seems to be a good one so far. If I had more plants blooming right now, maybe I'd have more butterflies hanging out here, but I have lots of host plants for various kinds of butterflies, so I hope that they don't fly on past. The only thing that I have blooming right now is the dianthus, but others will be blooming in the next few weeks. Cathy

Hey Lavender-- not at all a kitchen thought, but next to the woodstove you should definately plan a space to store wood. Not a lot of course, but we have a woodstove, and after my husband gets it going in the morning, he usually brings in 3-5 pieces so I can feed the fire during the day, without having to trek outside. We have a gavanized bucket that we use and a small part of our hearth that sticks out to set it down on, but I would love room for a small wood box on the actual stone hearth, and its not quite big enough. I am constantly cleaning up wood chips, fallen bark, spilled ashes, etc. So make sure there is a little space around your stove for those "function" things! Woodstoves are messy :) My wood floor however is not gunky at all near the stove, but I do vaccuum up debris almost every day so little feet, and doggie feet don't grind it into the floor and ruin the finish, stratch it, etc. Of course we use our stove from October through April most years (this look like an early spring this year though!!) So 7 months out of the year, my floor near the woodstove and hearth aren't ever clean for longer than a few hours :) In other kitchen news... I like your floorplan/layout. It is simple and functional, especially if you never clean-up during prep, because I do see the DW placement as a little bit tricky if you ever plan on having it open while you cook, which you say won't be often, but I only wonder if the door to the DW would open into the path of the oven door. I guess you'd have to measure the DW door height. And maybe its not a real issue... How wide is your trash?? It looks like its 18". Swapping the trash and dishwasher may only require that window to move a few (6) inches. Are you tring to center the window over the washer and dryer or align it with an exterior window?? Because I'd say function in the kitchen should trump beauty in the laundry room/pantry :) Good luck!!!

For the weddings of both my daughter and my son the favors were personalized pens...the pens had the names of the B&G, the date, and a small "saying" (DS's was "Our love forever true" and DD's was "A cord of three strands" -- from the Bible). There are several sites online to order them from and there are a wide range of styles and costs. You usually have to order a minimum # -- usually the minimum ranges from 50 to 250 -- and, of course, the more you order the cheaper the cost is per pen. (We ordered ours from Pens Xpress and paid about 35 cents each, with a minimum of 250.) I've posted this suggestion before, and I don't think too many people here were all that impressed with the idea. But, at least at these two weddings, the guests loved the pens -- we got a lot of positive feed-back. As is true of any kind of favor, there *were* guests that didn't take the pen/favor, but there were some guests at both weddings who wanted -- and went home with --several pens.