Hi Diane- It kind of depends on your personal garden style. If you are a neatnik, you will want to cut them to the ground when they hit the scraggly, past bloom stage so they don't detract from the rest of your garden composition. From my perspective, the scraggly flower heads are part of the transitional season that I appreciate, and I tend to leave the dry flower heads in place for awhile, allowing birds to feed on them. Then when I do cut them to the ground some weekds later, they are very dry and it's easy to scatter the seed where I want more plants for next summer. If powdery mildew is established on echinacea and rudbeckia, it's probably best to cut to the ground and discard the trimmings, to avoid it spreading further.

Yes, they are S-L-O-W to germinate directly in the ground. If you sow seeds in the garden, wait until the night temps are stable at 50 degrees or more and days temps are as Herblady49 stated. That is why I said mine were slow to get started - I grew them from seeds! Of course if you buy the plants, well that's a horse of a different color. They are definitely a "warm season" plant. They did not reseed for me. If they made seeds, I didn't find any. None came up the next year. For me, that was a god send. I love MGs but they grow too da*ned well here and take over. They even climbed up into my weeping willow tree. It was pretty, but the blueberry plants underneath were bombarded with the seeds in late summer and what a pain that was...and still is. Zillions of seeds coming up in that fertile, moist soil. Aaah! Here is a link to my Sunflower Morning glory photo site: Here is a link that might be useful: Annie's Sunflowers and Morning Glories of Past Summers

I am off to the local nurseries this morning. I am going to take a chance and get the Lemon BES. It might rain this afternoon, so decided that today is my "shopping" day. I hate shopping. So hard to make up my mind. Many times I come home with plants completely different than what I planned to buy! Steven...hopefully I will have better luck. I'm sure if you were to plant it again, it would grow great for you! Your yard is just beautiful now and you have amended your soil a great deal! (Especially the back yard) :-) Bloominganne....yes I had planned to plant 2 clematis on it this year. Had checked with the nursery last fall to see if they were going to get in more Kivistic clematis, as last year they lost their grower. Yup, they would be getting some in. So I waited....then I stopped last week on Monday and they had come in late Friday and SOLD OUT over the weekend. So now it is another year to wait as I have not had good luck with mail order clematis. Memo...thank you. Yes, DH is really a sweetie. He has a few project he wants to work on this summer. One is to hang the 1859 bronze bell (we purchased last year) in a corner bed in the front of the house. He is thinking about building a brick arch to hang it in. Hopefully it won't grow legs and walk off that way! party_music....the plants at the nursery are quite good sized and are blooming beautifully. So...fingers crossed. The picture above was taken on May 30, 2005 but not much has really changed. Just that the cedar has weathered gray on the obelisk. My peonies are all up with lots of buds. I expect them to be blooming in about 2 weeks. We have a very sandy soil that warms quickly in spring. I am finding that everything really gets an early start here. I usually start picking my strawberries on Memorial Day weekend. The lilacs are blooming now and I baked fresh rhubarb pie last week. Much different than the clay soil we had 160 miles north of where we live now. It is a joy to garden here.

Yes I did. Okay. I will be more specific. I grew mine together and they did splendidly together. I cannot know whether your MGs will overtake your BES vine. I only had a few MG vines mixed in with mine. They decided to grow together - I didn't plant them together. I didn't even plant the MGs! But if you have lots of MGs, they quite possibly could crowd out the BES. It is their nature to grow rampantly in order to reproduce. So, too much of anything is often too much, especially in a garden. MGs are more, shall we say, VIGOROUS, so keep that in mind. They take over everything if not thinned, and thinned a lot. I don't recall whether BES vine flowers are one day bloomers like MGs. MGs flowers open, then close up and then shrivel up and begin making seed pods within a day or two. Very short lived flowers. That is their way. As for the BES flowers, you might mark one with a piece of bright red string or something and see if it is still open the next day. Write it down and see how long it stays open. Then you will know. I just can't recall. I only grew them one time and that was about 10 years ago. Anyway, I wrote what I did above because I thought it was so funny (strange) that it worried or bothered you so much. I wouldn't have thought anything about it. That is what struck me as funny. As long as the leaves look healthy and it keeps making more flowers, I wouldn't care how long they stayed open. Look it up on the web. "Life Cycle of Black-eyed Susan vine flowers", or something like that for instance. I just don't know sweetie. If you think the MGs are strangling them out, remove some of them. Cut a few off at the ground and the next day when they are all shriveled up, you will know which ones to pull out of the mix. Just be careful not to cut your BES vines when you do it. Uh oh. :0 Hope this answers your questions. ~Annie