Hey girl, just had to come over here again and get my fix of harmony. My mental health is so thirsty! Thank you for that and thank you for the acknowledgement. No bad feelings allowed! I know you are there! :) I've been working on an alledged animal abuse case for a few days or rather I will just say more just being a mom to those working on the alledged animal abuse case. Being Mother Theresa is so draining! Lol! I think all is well with the animal in question but boy, the ruckus that resulted! Good thing I'm a tough old bird! :) I see that you are getting a bit of weather down there. We are through the cold part now and all is warming up again nicely. One morning it was -50C here with the windchill! All my little feathered and furred friends have been sticking really close to the house for food and warmth. I guess they know where to go for some TLC! :) I sure hope your mom and dad are doing ok (and the kitties and kiddies, young and old). I became a great aunt for the 10th time this morning at 6am London time. I think they are naming this little baby girl after my mom who passed when I was very young. And I ramble......cause I really needed a breather from the job.....:) Can't wait for spring! Building blankies and starting seeds will keep me busy till then. Keep the pics coming Celeste! I love it!! Bruce, there is absolutely no hope of you sneaking out of this forum as a non DL addict! You might as well submit to your fate! Lol! :) So excited to see your creations with your personal signature to them! Namaste Ginny

My choice and favorite choice is freesia. I plant them in late Fall for bloom in early Spring, then have an alternate set that I plant in Spring for early Summer to late Summer bloom while the leaves on the previous set set out to dry. I plant them in planters on my porch and deck and not in the yard because they are so highly fragrant that I would otherwise be on my hands and knees in the grassy yard just to take in their beauty and fragrance. LOL I have a rose cottage garden and as much as I love roses, freesia is right there with hyacinth among my most favorite of scents not to mention looks! Freesia releases a burst rather than remain fragrant like roses. I pluck the flowers and put them in tiny bottles of water next to my reading area and living room, just to be able to take in the scent. Here is a link that might be useful:

I'll tell you what I did and then decide if it is suitable for you. First, I'm in a warmer end of z6 and only on a rare ocassion all buds of 30+ macrophyllas I grow got killed. So, I didn't protect any of them and had no serious reason to grow ES since there are many much more interesting hydtangeas. However, I had one particular spot in a garden where macs don't want to bloom even after relatively warm winters. Problem with this spot is that it's in a full sun the whole winter and early spring and then become part-shaded as season progresses. What usually happens there is that hydrangeas buds start swelling very early and got zupped by March frosts. I planted three ES there last year and usual thing happened again even though we had an unusually warm winter. On April 1 I pruned all three of them to 6-8" off the ground leaving two pairs of live buds on a stem. By July they produced a lot of new growth from the old stems as well as from the base. First bloom occured on or about August 1, 4 months after pruning, on a new growth from the old stems and since then they are in a CONSTANT bloom because new growth from the base also produced flower buds, but 1-1.5 months later than the first set. This picture was taken last week. As you can see, right now I have a combo of aged (pink), semi-aged and new(blue) flowers on a same plant. Though plants are only 2'+ tall (no wonder with such severe spring pruning) I finally made hydrangeas bloom in that spot. How all this should be translated to z5? Unless you want to go a long way to protect current year top growth and have a mid-summer bloom, you may instead simply settle for the late-summer bloom on a new growth and do nothing, except mulching to protect the root zone.. Before ES was invented you had no luxury to chose the bloom time. Now you do.

Michelle, I agree that 2011 was truly horrible. We were out fighting wildfires day and night and were living on Gatorade, bottled water and whatever food I could grab in a hurry and take to fires. Forget watering the garden....I was watering firefighters. It was the worst summer ever with more firefighters sick from the heat than you can even imagine, including me. It ruined me for gardening because once you've had heat exhaustion or heat stroke, your body cannot tolerate heat the way it once did. After a lifetime of being very careful to take care of myself out in the heat, I blew it that summer----not from carelessness, but just because the demands for assistance at fires were so high and I couldn't ignore them. Nowadays I no longer can stay out and work in the garden for as long as I want....I have to come indoors before it gets too hot, which cramps my style and makes me cranky, but I do it anyhow. I don't want to ever get too overheated again. This should have been an easier summer than it has been. We've gone 61 days now without receiving 0.25" of rainfall on any one day. At our house, our total rainfall in that 61 days is 0.13", meaning our dry spell here this summer has been more prolonged than our worst dry spell in 2011. What has saved the trees, at least, is that we had roughly 54" of rainfall this year (our annual average is 39") before it stopped raining. Our upper level soil moisture is 0.0 in the upper few inches of soil, but there is good soil moisture a couple of feet down. Our Keetch-Byram Drought Index at the present time is almost as high as it was during the worst of 2011. In 2011, I understood what was going on as the drought developed throughout the year....even back in the winter and spring as we headed into summer, so watching it was like seeing a train wreck coming.....This summer's Flash Drought has been harder to fathom because it came out of left field so abruptly, beginning while we still had roads and fields under water from the flooding. On the last day that it rained, we had no idea it was "never" going to rain again for the next couple of months. If we had, we probably would have enjoyed the flooding more than we did. It is 102 degrees here today and just so danged hot, and there have been fires in the area, but not in our fire district. (Knock on wood!) The cold front is supposed to come through here overnight and to bring us blessedly cooler temperatures and rainfall. I can't wait, and I'm gonna be one mad gardener if the rain misses us again, although I'll still enjoy having highs in the 80s or lower 90s instead of in the 100s. Our next door neighbor in Ft. Worth had the old hardy neon pink-flowered phlox commonly referred to as thrift. I loved hers, but I didn't have luck with it in our blackland prairie clay (right next door to us she had a much sandier soil), and I've never planted it here. We do have the native phlox that blooms in spring here. It lives happily in the bar ditch down by the road, where presumably it gets enough moisture from rain runoff to keep it happy....and Tim isn't allowed to mow it until it has finished blooming. On upland areas, we stay too dry for the native phlox to thrive, so I have to make sure we leave it alone and don't mow it back too early in the one area of our property that has enough moisture for it. It was gorgeous this year in April, but drowned in May's 25.5" of rain. Dawn