Thanks for a beautiful inspiration! I love looking at garden photos from the conception to the finished product. Photos of roses are lovely but photos of roses actually in the garden are fascinating! I have ordered some of the roses you have - Duchesse d'Auerstadt, Leys Perpetual, Chromatella. You will love Parade! I had one languishing in a 1 gallon pot while I finished nursing school....watered it when I had a minute which wasnt often. When it finally went in the ground, it grew wildly, and last spring was over the arbor and completely covered in pink blooms - you will love it! Good luck to you - I am going to start a big project like yours in my back yard soon. Hope you will post photos as it matures. Good luck - from a 59 yr. old not quite yet arthiritic woman, but who probably will be soon - broke my patella in Nov. but getting aroun nicely. Its beautiful! Keep us updated! Judith

1) I need to enlarge one of my beds by 18" or so across the front. A couple of sprawling roses in the bed have encroached on the lawn and interfere with mowing, and I don't want to move them, so I'll move the lawn instead. I also need to get a better handle on companion plant selection and placement. And I need a few strategically placed stepping stones in the deeper beds to make it easier to avoid treading on said companion plants. Certain areas of this year's garden have looked as though a moose was coming out of the woods every night to stomp on them. Or maybe wild pigs. 2) I have a blend of different bloom sizes, shapes, and petal counts. I don't care much for "lazy" blooms that look like they could be more full or more shapely, if only they were willing to put out the effort. But when a rose says "this is what I am and I'm proud of it," then I don't care whether it has 5 petals or hundreds of them. 3) I've reached my limit, space wise, with 142 individual cultivars, plus duplicates of several roses I wanted to audition in more than one area of the garden. Any duplicate that is truly redundant is living on borrowed time and will go away when I need the space for something else. I also have a few plants at risk of eventual displacement because of health or performance issues. Or simply because of their failure to please. 4) I try to visit the Gardens of the American Rose Center over in Shreveport every year or two. They haven't been a source of much inspiration in the area of garden design, but I do see roses that make it onto my wish list. At least they do when I can find a label. That's what I'd change if I could: a garden that exists to promote roses should do a much better job of identifying them. It makes it all the more frustrating that I'm in a nearly identical climate zone, and thus have an interest in knowing what doesn't thrive there, as well as what does.

Well I decided to go ahead and cut the Jade and make a nice stump out of it. So first I had to cut the side growth at the bottom of the Jade just under the soil like...this tiny thing started to grow soon as the Jade started to root.(1st pic). What I did not know is that it was also attacked to the MAJORITY of the root system as there was a problem under the soil i did not know about. The baby came off the main Jade just fine with most of its roots in tact. So I cut this small side branching. Then I decided to cut this lower branch off the Jade before cutting the trunk. That is when I started to notice a problem. The Jade plant was not secure at all now. In fact it was hard to make the trunk cut without uprooted the whole Jade plant. Once I got the trunk cut I noticed that the stump was pretty much just sitting in the soil. So I gently pulled on it to see how well rooted it really was. It all but came up in my hand. That then revealed the real problem. The bottom of the trunk was rotting! I cut the rotted portion off the stump, actually had to cut to chunks off. There is only one small section of root. The main portion of root was actually attached to the baby I took off the side of it in the above second pic. Sigh..so this is a MAJOR setback if not a total demise to the stump project. I am very sad to have found this...but on the other hand if I had not decided to go ahead with the stump project I may not have found this till the whole Jade was a loss..So I guess in that respect I can feel blessed. I will let the stump callous over along with the Main big plant and then repot them both hoping for the best. Mary

Hmmmm, I'll try again, just typed in some of my favorites, dropped a catalog on the keyboard and erased everything, it doesn't help that my eyes are almost swollen shut due to a mishap yesterday. Here goes for the second time. Three of my favorite Alliums, Karataviense lovely foliage on this guy. Christohii big flowers on a 1 to 2' stems and the third Schubertii these guys remind me of fireworks. I don't grow Daffs any more, lost too many to the Narcissus fly. I use to grow them for exhibition and it just got too darn expensive to keep replacing them. I have a few tulips but with a lot of the varieties if you don't dig them after they have died down and plant them in a new position they seem to get fire blight. It seems I have fallen in love with all the minor bulbs. Crocus, Snowdrops, Muscari, Chioodoxa, Spanish Bluebells, Dwarf Iris and Hyacinths as well. Looks like I'll soon be adding Puschkinia :o). To go out in the garden when winter's on the way out, to see all these bright cheerful little reminders that winter is on her last legs and spring is around the corner, all the mistakes I made in the garden the previous year are behind me and I haven't made the new mistakes YET LOL. I love seeing little drifts of minor bulbs that have naturalized here and there, it really brings a smile to my face. Another thing I like about these guys, it doesn't take forever for the foliage to die back. Annette