If you want to set up a tank for an eldery person whose eyesight is weak and is becomming senile, and you will need to rely on tank maintenance by a caretaker who may not like or have the least notion of how to care for fish, I would strongly recommend that you belay both a 10 gallon, and tropicals altogether. If your budget allows and there is space in your MIL's home for a 29 with a really good filter, the old lady would receive great pleasure from a few fancy goldfish and the caretaker would have far less work. Because they are cheap, Goldies are greatly underrated as aquarium fish, yet some of the fancies are among the most beautiful of all fishes and will become very tame with a little personal attention, but they are large and bulky and simply cannot be kept in small tanks, let alone bowls. To make keeping Goldies really simple, you almost can't beat a 29 with an Eclipse hood on it. Then, all you would need are some large decorative stones too large to be picked up in a decent sized siphon hose. Then, cleaning the bottom is easy. Once a week, just move the stones around to pick up any mulm on the bottom, give the interior glass a swipe with a scrubber kept for that purpose to remove any algae, then 3, 5 gal. buckets out and 3 in- and the tank would remain sparkling clean and the fish healthy. However, the caretaker would have to know how to take the filter apart at least once a month, to clean the impeller and change the filter pad, but once they have done it, they would see how quick and easy a chore it really is. Such a set up would support 3 fancies nicely and your MIL would have beautiful, slow moving, hardy fish that would be both large enough to hold her attention even with weak eyes, and tame enough to keep her watching and talking to them.

"And I have newfound hope for the garden." Sherry, that says it all. Your post perfectly expresses my own thoughts about gardening and sums up what it can teach us: that we must both struggle and adapt; that life is change; that while there is always loss there is always also renewal; that living organisms struggle mightily to survive, and succeed more often than we might have expected. You've been through hard and frightening times lately, and I wonder if your experiences in gardening turned out to have any meaning when you were so worried about your husband? Applying lessons in philosophy to life is terribly difficult. I don't know whether I would be able to do so, but I do know that, in the garden at least, I've learned to accept the idea of change. Plants grow, and crowd other plants; a tree blows over, and sun bakes a part of the garden it never reached before; I mulch and mulch, the grass grows for years, the earth becomes softer and earthworms arrive; cane girdler shows up and devastates the roses; a wet winter comes and provokes a major slide; I plan a romantic ravine on the site of said slide. And so on and on. Gardening is life, really. I hope I'll never reach the point where I don't want to grow things any more, because I fear it would mean I had spiritually died. About all the plants I talk about that you don't know. North and Central Florida have a soil and climate that don't have many equivalents in other parts of the world, at least, not ones well published in the annals of horticulture. Florida's too hot and humid for many temperate climate plants; too wet in summer for those adapted to Mediterranean conditions; too cold, with its occasional sharp freezes, for tropicals. So the plants belonging to the great gardening traditions of continental Europe, of Great Britain, and of the Mediterranean basin, of the various tropical zones of the world, much of the time don't work. There are nurserymen (and -women), horticulturalists, and gardeners who do a lot of research looking for plants adapted to Florida conditions, and find them, but the plants aren't handed to them on a plate. My sisters' coastal north Florida gardens, with their gingers, cycads, hardy citrus, huge agaves, Sabal palms and live oaks and hickories, contain hardly a plant I could grow here. But their gardens are beautiful. Congratulations on your getting back to your garden, and on finding out that it was still there! And on having a daughter-in-law who helps you. I live next door to dairy farmers. In my experience they rely on lots of big machines, government price supports and subsidies, a reasonable amount of technical expertise, and a great deal of steady, ongoing, hard physical labor. Lavender Lass, I wholeheartedly agree. I wish I could find words to express my delight in gardening in cooperation with Nature, my intelligence spreading its wings as I attempt to read and understand the conditions of my land. Gean, the Hugelkultur sounds interesting--I'd never heard of it--but my heart faints within me at the thought of digging out an entire bed to fill the bottom of it with rotting wood, even if we had much of that material. We don't have anything like enough decomposing organic matter available. We amend our propagating beds with bagged coarse sand and bagged compost, since we NEVER have enough organic matter from our own supplies. As the previous year's crop of plants matures we dig them out and plant them, and then we add the amendments to the beds, dig them in, and start the new cuttings. Last year I left the digging to my husband and suspect he didn't dig deep and thoroughly enough. The exceptionally wet winter may also have made a difference. This year's yield was terrible. I always amend my planting holes abundantly with old hay. Sometimes I have to dig and amend a hole two years running before it can support a rose. You're right that I have a garden: and thanks for saying so in the face of my sometime expressions of discouragement. However, I do wonder if you realize how dead my sunny garden looks in August, with no trees, hardly any large shrubs, after it hasn't rained nor been watered for two months, the sun blazing down the entire time, and nothing growing but the weeds. I don't know how many people dry garden in a dry summer climate as I do (though, unlike much of California, we do have good average annual rainfall). I believe the garden will look far more prosperous in summer once our many infant and young trees and shrubs start to get some size on them. Shade and leafage are precious allies. Jeannie, thanks for saying so. I care about my writing; and I love it when others respond. That's beautiful. Kitty, I want to answer your post but must put it off. My assistant is coming to help in the garden and I need to change. It's supposed to start raining this afternoon; I believe fall, as in gloom and chill, has finally come. The garden has greened up amazingly in the last month and has been a pleasure to see and work in. Melissa

The Amazon series wasn't bred for perennial production. It's to be treated as an annual. Pan American Seed actually bred this F1 hybrid for commercial greenhouse and field cutflower programs. There are four available in this series: Neon Cherry, Neon Purple, Neon Duo (mix of cherry and purple), and Rose Magic. Rose Magic isn't Neon; however, it is part of the Amazon series. The colors of the Amazon Neon are saturated. The entire series is heat tolerant. They are also disease resistant. Because they are heat tolerant and require no vernalization period, the benefit to commercial growers is they can be succession planted all season just as we do with many of our other cutflower crops. The customer doesn't recognize the Amazon series as dianthus because they're blooming during the summer, their flower heads are larger, and the stems are stronger. They generally assume that it is phlox. The Rose Magic isn't that popular with market customers, florists, and growers; however, not because of what you referred to as a "clown effect." People usually expect that Sweet William is going to have that look. The spring blooming Sweet Williams are harlequin (Electron and Hollandia). That is the joy of those varieties. The reason that Rose Magic isn't widely accepted is because the color is too muted and faded looking. Trish

Hehe. All of your pics look great! Your photo above looks like a sunset, but when you turn it upside down, it looks like a sunrise....I know, I'm crazy when I look at pics, a wild imagination leftover from childhood maybe. Kt