Alameda, I am visualizing your color combo. It seems as though it is very striking! I like the Munstead Wood lavender but I have not seen it available here; our summers could be too hot and dry. I am usually fairly adept with colors, sometimes to the extreme. My big issue is the lack of knowledge of the availability of plants matching the colors in my head. Belinda' Dream, as I have not seen her in person appears to be a little different in coloration (photos) and. how it the color will play out once it is in my soil and dealing with the heat????? Kippythe hippy I am expecting the Belinda's Dream to encompass the better part of the 8' in width (horizontal) that I have in the rectangle and be quite larger than my icebergs. There's not much in terms of a winter dormancy here so the growing season is long, and there are a lot of blue skies and sun. Rose bushes become large. I love what I call an orderly but informal garden. I like symmetry, balance, but also plants that spill over walls, into walkways etc., roses that nod, things that trail . Debbie1776, I really like the look of Russian Sage. I have been researching this plant to determine its requirements and an image showing what a mature version of it looks like. I have seen so many variations. This post was edited by desertgarden561 on Mon, Jul 29, 13 at 0:12

Well Adiro, since you asked for other suggestions... For the yellow, add me to Julia's list of fans. She's had no love this summer and no regular feeding, but she's performed and performed and is healthy, too. Rarely out of bloom. Great little rose. CPM is a good rose, too. She was apricot for me early in the season, when it was cool. Most of the time, she's creamy colored, with tinges of apricot. But she's also in full sun all day, so if you put her in the shade a bit, the color may change. I'd suggest Prairie Sunrise as a nice apricot with that flower shape. Very healthy, nice smell and definitely apricot. Not familiar with any of your pink choices (other than Eden, who was SP'd), but I think that Dainty Bess is one of the prettiest pink roses in the garden. She even smells nice, and despite being girly-girl pretty, isn't high maintenance. If you're not into singles, Comte de Chambord is super-smelly and always in bloom (though it does crud up a little bit and can get BS). Also nice smelling and everblooming: Belinda's Dream (and this is a super-tough rose that cuts real nice, too). Even when she gets BS, she shakes it off and keeps on pumping out the blooms like she doesn't even notice. For white, would you consider an old rose? There's the reblooming and wonderful smelling Boule de Neige... Full Sail smells nice, too, if you're already planning to spray. For red, the only repeater I grow (and can speak on) is Chrysler Imperial. I've been very impressed by the deep, velvety color, the intoxicating smell and the health. I rarely grow doubles of anything, but if I had an extra bed somewhere, CI would be filling half of it. Highly recommend. It's also nice to cut. But, it is also pretty common... Hope this doesn't veer too far off your list!

Maybe it just does well in my climate, but I adore Dorcas. Bucks dont have much scent, but I dont care - this one is out in full hot Texas sun, is a big huge strong bush with well shaped blooms that stay on the bush a long time - I just finished deadheading another flush - and great disease resistance. I think the "dorky" name has hurt it - it is anything but dorky! Maybe not much is heard about it because it isnt grown much. Mine is in the middle of Sally Holmes and Chuckles on the other side [another fabulous, heavy blooming, beautiful rose, much underused!] and they are along a front fencline in the all day sun. They bloom all the time - the 3 of them are always putting on a show. I decided I wanted Dorcas near the house to enjoy and it was very hard to find. I get most of my Bucks at Chamblees but they didnt have it anymore. Got mine from Hortico, they are being shipped right now, so should get them in a few days. I will be sure to put my 2 Dorcas roses in a prime spot so I can enjoy their beauty. For me, this is one of Dr. Bucks very best! Give it a try! I have some photos someplace on my memory stick, but finding them is another matter. If I have time to look, in between putting up Christmas, I will post some photos. Dont overlook Bright Melody either, and you should see Barn Dance today! Covered in lovely pink blooms, big strong bush....I would like another of this. Dorcas's blooms are more well formed or "finished" - they arent loose and floppy and they remain on the bush a long time. Tough as boot leather, as we say in Texas.

The comments about ten-power settings got me musing on the subject and about Amy's initial question about logarithmic power controls. Here's where that lead me. Nobody really has logarithmic power controls, but there can be power settings spaced to sort of approximate a logarithmic curve -- a number of settings at the low end with only a couple of additional points needed to define the steep side of the curve for really high heat. In theory, that can be done with a ten-step power curve and some folks do find 10 power settings fine for what and how they cook. Others do not. Is anybody else here old enough to remember the GE stoves and cooktops from 50's and 60's with ten mechanical pushbuttons for heat settings? Those pushbuttons were literally "digital" controls, meaning that you punched them with one of your digits. GE sold a lot of them for a couple of decades, so some people found them adequate. Some did not. For the current digital electronic ten-step controls, others here besides loonlakecamp have reported satisfaction with a ten step set-up. Others, like me, would find them inconvenient for my cooking with, say, my pressure cookers. With only ten heat level steps, I would have to be constantly switching settings to maintain the correct pressure. Power setting "1" might be too low, setting "2" might be too high. Switch to 1 for a while until the pressure drops a little too low, switch to 2 for a while until it gets a little too high, then back to 1, etc., etc. With in-between settings, I avoid that annoyance. You don't use pressure cookers? Then maybe having in-between steps won't matter to you. This is just one example of how cooking styles can differ and how more settings can matter to one cook and not to another. Much fuss is sometimes made about the supposedly infinite adjustablity of gas burners. As a practical matter, though, we mostly try to get the burner to the same relatively few settings. Searing is pretty much searing, isn't it? If you deep fat fry, how often would you care if if the oil were at 352° instead of 350°? But maybe somebody is working with sugar syrups where, say, it might matter if a syrup is at 325° and not 360° and then maybe it matters if the induction burner only has ten settings. That said, the subject of induction power settings and controls can be more complicated than just the number of settings. The need for finding "in-between" steps for induction cooking can reflect two different aspects of ways that manufacturers design induction burner controls. One consideration is the power cycling that all induction burners use for settings of less than full power. A technical term for this is "pulse width modulation. or "PWM." It is the same kind of thing a microwave does for low heat levels---momentary pulses of power that average out at a particular heat level. With most PICs as well as some brands of induction cooktops and ranges, the PWM is pretty crude. I've seen this somewhere described as firing up the burner for a second or two of omigosh hot and then switching totally off for three or four seconds. While these pulses average out at a certain heat level the timing can be problematic for, say, the srambled eggs that Amy mentioned at the outset. Combine that kind of "low frequency" PWM with the crude power controls found on many PICs, and you could have a reason that Amy would find herself wanting steps in-between power level "1" and "2" for scambling eggs. Some full size induction ranges and cooktops work this way. I noticed a lot of pulsing at the low heat settings on the Maytag induction range I saw demoed several years ago when I was stove shopping. From past threads on PWM, I gather than Whirlpool's induction ranges and cooktops (which include Maytag and Kitchenaid brands) have used crude PWM. For searching out past threads here on this subject try a search strings like "induction + pulsing + gardenweb" and "induction + cycling + gardenweb." A few of the expensive PICs (Cooktek, Garland, Vollrath) and many full size ranges and cooktops use much higher frequency PWM. Instead switching on and off for a second or more at time, the power switches on and off many times per second. The higher frequency of switching yields much finer power control that more closely approximates a steady heat level. The other design aspect that can lead to wanting "in-between" settings is in how the engineers program the electronic controllers to space the power settings on the appliance you are using --- that's the kind of logarithmic curve I thnk Amy may been thinking about when she posed her question in the original post. . For manufacturers, the least costly controls use simple linear spacing. Setting "1" would use the PWM to average 10% power, setting "2" would be 20%, etc. Even with a high quality PWM, though, 9 or 10 linear settings may be too crude, A thing most induction users discover pretty quickly is that they do most of their cooking in the low to medium range settings. The highest setting can be used for boiling. One or two medium high settings takes care of high heat applications like searing. There seem to be three strategies for induction manufacturers to address the crudeness. One is to add half-steps between the numbered power settings. The other is to program the stove's controllers to put more steps in the low to medium range and fewer in the high ranges. The third strategey combines the first two. Without using the particular induction stove or cooktop, it can be hard to find out whether the particular unit was designed to use one or the other or some combination of them. In my own somewhat limited experience, it seems that the GE induction appliances and Electrolux's Frigidaire/Kenmore ranges seemed to use a modified-half step approach with some concentration of steps but also using half steps for finer control. The Electrolux-branded models use a slightly different approach with quarter-steps at the lower power ends and fewer steps at the high end. Miele cooktops seem to use a similar kind of mix with the option of switching on more steps. I'm not sure how BSH (which includes Bosch) handles this except that their induction appliances manuals show that half-steps are available. The Samsung freeestanding induction ranges seemed to follow the GE model (19 half steps). The reports about Samsung's ten-step "Chef Collection" model seem to conflict, some seeming to say that stepping is linear, some hinting that the settings may be skewed to the lower end. There is a yet another strategy which is the near infinite stepping of of potentiometer-like controls. These control systems seem to be very expensive so, AFAIK, they are used only for the commercial Garland/Manitowiac PICS and maybe the new Miele induction range have this. I say "maybe" for the Miele because there is nothing about it in the product literature and the display shows only whole-number settings, but a couple of posters here -- livinginseattle is the name I recall -- have reported finding that the knobs can be turned to provide fine gradations of "in-between" settings. Some folks would find that ideal. Then the question becomes: how much are you willing to spend for the "ideal" (and are there other design compromises that have to accept in order to get that ideal function for the burners?)