Hi Wellspring/Charlotte! Lots of good things to think about in your comments... While everyone's experience is going to be different, I generally find the input from someone who deals with the issues themselves everyday particularly useful in highlighting details to think about. It did finally occur to me on the weekend to search on the Accessible Gardening forum here but I didn't find much. 'Introducing' my friend to her garden by walking around it and giving her a running commentary on it is definitely something we'll need to do. She's probably still in the early stages of developing those mapping skills you have so it'll be good practice for her to get very familiar with the garden space. She's still in the process of 'mapping' the inside of the house. She does have the depth perception problem (as do I...) so we're both somewhat used to dealing with that - but have the bruises to show that one can never let down one's guard! My friend just about knocked herself out last week when she mis-judged where the bathroom door was in the middle of the night apparently! (She was still following her old 'map' from the condo when she was half asleep...) I do need to get a better sense of what a garden means for her. Other than scented things, I'm not really sure. I know my garden preferences are largely formed by the gardens I grew up with as a child. I have no idea what gardens in her original part of the world look like and what expectations she might have with respect to things like foliage shapes, flower colors etc. We'll have to explore all that. There may be some unrealistic expectations to deal with too - I remember a girl from Guyana in my university days being baffled by the fact that tomatoes had to be planted again each year! And there's lots of new language issues for us to work out together I'm sure. The garden that's at the house now largely follows the foundation and the fence line. The path to the front door has garden beds on both sides. The path itself worries me. It's narrow at the driveway end - made with ~2' paving stones - and there's a 4-6" drop to the driveway at the end. At the front door end, the path widens to a landing area made with 3-4' patio stones - which are not level! There are 2 steps to the front door and then a step up into the front hall. The steps to the door are also not level and there is no handrail to provide support. It strikes me as dangerous - but is it something that she will just learn to navigate easily/safely from habit or should they be making a new entrance a priority? Is a trench edge also a hazard - i.e. if you step into it, it's easy to fall. (That's one of the reasons I spent a good part of last summer and fall replacing all my trench edging with brick... I was thinking that would be a good idea for her for areas she's likely to be walking frequently...?) Overhead obstacles are, I think, a big future issue at my friend's house. In this TINY backyard, the previous owner planted 3 (!!) pine trees of some sort. At the moment they're still only about 4' tall but in a few years they will totally eat up the yard! I think they should get rid of them now before they become an issue, but I sense it's going to be hard to convince a pair of non-gardeners to cut down these seemingly small green things! The previous owners planted quite a few roses up against the house. I've been wondering if they're likely to be an issue at all. I've seen my friend reach out her hand to the house wall for support, fairly near the roses. How often do do entangle yourself in rose thorns?! Should the roses be moved to places where she is unlikely to accidentally reach into or fall against them? I like the idea of brightly colored pots at the end of a bench that is easily reached. We haven't actually ventured out to the backyard yet so I don't have a very good sense of the space out there yet. From indoors, it looks a bit sloped and uneven and greatly in need of a level place for sitting etc. We'll probably have to wait another 6 weeks or so to really check things out. Probably some people are thinking this discussion doesn't belong here. I don't know how to switch the discussion to e-mail... But, since designing for accessibility is an issue these days in many situations, I thought this discussion might provide some insights into practical aspects from a 'user' perspective :-) There are certainly lots of well-meaning 'accessible' alterations out there that drive me nuts - and I'm sure you find the same sort of thing. As much as possible, I want to avoid inadvertently causing problems for my friend so I value your perspective on all this. Woody/Susan

I've grown the Goldstrum variety of black-eyed susans for years, but never cut it back so I can't answer your question. I don't see what harm it would do if you cut back any unattractive flower stalks a foot or so. Just leave the leaves at the base. I always cut the flower stems down anyhow come late fall. Right now in Z7, Virginia, my black-eyed susans are getting a little ragged, with many of the flower petals drying. Maybe in your zone you still have nice flowers. I'd hate to cut mine back if they still had good petals. You could hold off and cut back in a week or two. But from my experience, I really don't think any perennial reblooms with the same quality as its first spring blooms.

Gardengal, Buyorsell, Michael, Thank you all for your comments! You're all giving me the impression that I can grow a lot of kinds of clematis, and that's what I love to hear. Buyorsell, "shade" here is in the context of a hot sunny climate. I follow your argument, but actually my best performer in the (so-called) shade garden has been 'Mme. Julia Correvon', a Viticella cultivar. I'm always suspicious about vining plants that are supposed to require full sun. The shade garden is actually half sun, and as I said many roses that like a cooler atmosphere do better here than out in the more exposed sunny garden. I do have one Texensis cultivar that looks perpetually starved and put-upon, and I would like to try it in a sunnier position, because those Texensis hybrids are just too pretty. Michael, thanks for your comments. I live in the hills in the province of Piacenza. I didn't recall seeing Clematis viticella around here (as opposed to C. vitalba which is everywhere and horribly invasive), so I checked my 'Flora Piacentina' and in fact C. viticella isn't found wild in the province; the only native Clematis species here is C. vitalba. I don't know what C. viticella's native range in Italy is. I have C. integrifolia down in one of the sunnier spots in the shade garden, with old roses and herbaceous peonies, and like them it's doing fine. The environment is the edge of a woodland, which I find a lot of garden plants like. I rarely have problems with drainage, because of our steep slope. Let's hope that C. tangutica will be happy under these conditions. I believe my sister told me she grew it in western Washington, which is certainly wet enough in the wintertime. It sounds like C. tangutica would do best at the edge of a drop, though. I've had C. alpina in my garden, in some of the shadier spots, for a couple of years, and it does pretty well. Even though we have hot summers, the air is dry and temperatures drop at night. I have an idea that plants that suffer from summer heat do so in humid summer climates where the air stays warm twenty-four hours a day. I'm happy to hear what you have to say about C. heracleifolia, and am already thinking about hot sunny banks in the garden, of which I have many! About clematis and watering, I'm sure that the large-flowered patens hybrids appreciate summer water where they get it, but they can manage without once they're established: mine do at any rate. This may owe much to the considerable depth of clay in our garden, to our abundant spring rains, and to the permanent hay mulch. After the first year I lose few plants to drought, even though we don't water. I know I sound like I'm contradicting much of what you've said. It's not out of perversity, but I've gardened for years in both the U.S. and in Italy, and have been able to see how the climate differs here from that of the eastern U.S. and the Midwest in particular. Again, thank you all for your comments; I appreciate your taking the trouble to respond. Melissa

Kathy, Just like Bluebell Ice Cream always says "We eat all we can and sell the rest...." No, just kidding, we don't actually sell any. LOL We absolutely eat all we can. The first few ripe tomatoes always go into bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches, which is ALL we eat in spring when the first tomatoes are available. Then, after we calm down from the excitement of having tomatoes, we began to eat them in salads, sliced, or even held in our hands and eaten the same way you'd eat a fresh peach. When the tomatoes start getting ripe, that's about all I eat--tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Here's a typical "tomato day" early in the season when the tomatoes are ripening: I'll chop them up and stir them into an omelet (along with garden-fresh green onions and mini bell peppers) for breakfast, eat handfuls of little ones while working in the garden, and then come inside for lunch. Lunch will be a BLT (turkey bacon most of the time, but really good, high-quality "real"bacon for the first few) or even fried green tomato BLTs with cilantro mayo. Then, if I work outside in the garden in the afternoon, you know I'm going to eat several handfuls of cherry types like Black Cherry, Sungold, Tess's Land Race Currant, etc. Dinner? At the very least, it will include a salad with fresh tomatoes. Maybe a sauce if there's that many ripe or tomato-onion pie, or salsa, etc. When tomatoes are in season, we can't get enough of them. I also like to make gazpacho, a tomato-based chicken tortilla soup, taco soup or tomato-basil soup. I also dehydrate larger ones, but cut them into quarters or even eighths so they dry more quickly. I used to give a whole lot away, but now I put up more for winter and give fewer away. You can even freeze them whole. Just pop them into a freezer bag and freeze them after you've washed them and let them dry. In the winter, you can take them out of the freezer and use them in sauces or soups. I love to make sauce from a combination of different kinds. The best tomato sauces I've ever made have been a combination of many kinds of heirloom tomatoes--not all paste ones. The blacks and the Brandywine types, in particular, makes the most amazing sauces and salsas. For drying, you can use a small food dehydrator (Wal-Mart usually has the round ones with several trays), a large and fancy dehydrator like an Excaliber (sp?) or even an oven. You can dry them in a regular oven by slicing the cherry, pear, and currant tomatoes in half and placing them skin down/cut side facing upward on baking sheets, setting the oven on its lowest setting "warm", and 'baking' them until they are sufficiently dry. If you have a convection oven, you can use the convection oven to dry them even more quickly. My stove (which certainly is smarter than I am and has feature I've never even tried to use) has a "Dehydrate" feature meant to be used with the convection oven. I just love it. I can dry six cookie sheets of tomatoes at one time, and the house smells heavenly when they are drying. I feel like I've died and gone to tomato heaven when the house smells like that! I dry thousands of small tomatoes every year, pack them into zip-lock bags and put them in the freezer. During the "off-season", I pull out a bag and eat them. You can eat them dry--they resemble raisins except with intense tomato flavor--or you can rehydrate them in a bowl of water for a couple of hours. Or, you can use them in any recipe that calls for sun-dried tomatoes. I like them any way at all. In an exceptionally rainy year, the excess rain "waters down" the flavor of tomatoes and almost ruins them because it makes them so bland. (People who over-water and over-fertilize often "ruin" their tomtoes in the same way.) In a year like that, you can "salvage" your crop, though, by either dehydrating them, which removes the excess moisture and intensifies the flavor, or by cooking them down into sauce, which does the same thing. I have recipes to prepare tomatoes many different ways and I'll share some of them with you as the tomatoes ripen. I even have recipes for tomato pie and tomato cake! (Tomatoes are VERY versatile.) Here's how I use them: Cherry, Grape, Currant types: eat by the handful all day long straight off the vines while working in the garden. If you don't spray with chemicals, you can do this. If you spray your plants with Daconil (chlorothalonil) or any other chemical sprays (whether natural or chemical in nature), you obviously have to wash the fruit first. We eat them in salads daily, dehydrate them for the winter months, etc. If you raise Principe' Borghese, you can pull it up by the roots and air-dry it by hanging it upside down in a dry basement, attic, cellar, etc. but you can't really "sun-dry" them here in OK the way they do in Italy because we have too much humidity. Well, people in SW OK might be able to sun-dry, but I can't even do it here in southcentral OK except in the hottest, driest droughts when humidity is insanely low. With the paste tomatoes, we use them for salsa. You have to have several paste tomato plants to get enough ripe ones at one time for tomato sauce. It takes a LOT of tomatoes to make a pot of pasta sauce. Remember that tomatoes are largely water and most of that water boils away so what seems like a "lot" of tomatoes cooks down over the hours into a relatively small amount of sauce. So, most of the paste tomatoes we raise are used for salsa or pico de gallo. Yellow pear and other similar yellow tomatoes make wonderful tomato marmalade or tomato preserves, but you can only make small batches of a few jars unless you have multiple plants. When you start getting lots of tomatoes, you can use them so many ways......one of my favorite is a tomato-onion pie that is sort of like a quiche. They make great, fairly quick pizza sauce and then you can make pizza using home-made crust or Boboli crusts. If I want to make a pizza or pasta sauce for dinner, I fill up a crockpot with tomatoes in the morning after breakfast, set it on low and let them cook down all day. Sometimes I remove the lid so more moisture cooks off more quickly. Then, when I come in at 3 or 4, I transfer them to a pot on the stove, boil them down as needed, and add the remaining ingredients, simmering the sauce for an hour or two for dinner at 5 or 6 p.m. Kathy, there are so many ways to prepare them! Sometimes, I think people get "bogged down" or "stuck" eating them fresh and forget how versatile they are. Maybe we can start a "favorite tomato recipe" thread in a few weeks and just keep adding to it and adding to it. One plant of each variety is fine, unless you want more. If I am planning on making and canning a LOT of sauce, I plant a couple of dozen paste tomatoes--they grow very well in buckets. You don't have room for that many, and I can't can as much as I used to because my new stove, purchased last summer, has a ceramic top and canning is not recomended. The old stove is in the garage, though, and I can plug it in and use it for canning because it was the oven that went out on it, not the burners. (For some reason, DH really wanted a "new" stove, although I would have been happy fixing the old one's oven.) Tomato plants are self-fertile, so they pollinate and fertilize themselves via air movement, so only one type of each is needed. Of course, as space allows you can add more. If you want to save seed AND you want to avoid the possibility of having insects like small bees and flies cause cross-pollination, you have to bag your blossoms even before they open. For blossom bagging, just go to the wedding part of the craft section at your local Wal-Mart (tee hee) and buy a set of the litle bags sold there for rice or whatever. I think one package has ten bags? After the fruit form, you can remove the bags and re-use them, but be sure to mark that branch so you know to save seeds from that cluster of tomatoes. I usually use surveyor's tape as a marker when I bag blossoms, but I don't do it all that often because I'm so busy during the garden season that I don't save a lot of seeds. I hope I answered your questions. If I didn't, ask more or ask again. And, if you want to see which tomatoes are "in favor" this year, watch when I type up the list of what actually went into the ground. I often plant two of each variety, but then maybe 4 of a few of the ones we really adore. Well, except for Tess's Land Race Currant. It gets so huge that one is all you need and, even at that, I leave hundreds and hundreds of them on the plant for the birds because I get tired of picking the thousands of tiny tomatoes that one plant makes over the course of the growing season. In the "old days" they used to plant hollyhocks to "hide" the outhouse from view. Well, if I had an outhouse, I'd just plant one Tess's Land Race Currant and it would hide it from view all by itself! Happy tomato growing and eating! Now that I have tomatoes on the brain, I'm going to go take a bag out of the freezer now to rehydrate for lunch. Dawn