Tracy ~ I started hanging shells from my little nature tree this morning before heading off to work. I'm using a fine gold thread to hang them with. DH saw it and really liked it so that made me feel good. I told him I wish I had a small star fish for the top. Don't know if we can find any of those anywhere or not. He said they may not be 'politically correct' these days. I said 'What stars aren't politically correct? They're in the sky for Pete's sake!" (See how easy it is to take something other than what the person meant.) :-) He meant harvesting and selling the little creatures. DUH. Sometimes I think FL has her head in the flowers too much. There is a seashell place in the next town south of us. They might have some, maybe. Except they wouldn't have been found by us. DH did find a nice star fish in some seaweed one time not long ago. We had never found one before and this one was perfect! It's too large for my little tree though. I do have bits and pieces of sand dollars, and DH suggested that if I had one with the star in the center he might could cut it out for me. I told him I didn't think I had that, but I'll have to do a more thorough search tomorrow morning. I will post pictures when it's done. FlowerLady

I will start an "Early June" thread some time tomorrow. The irises in my garden are just opening. Irises are my favorite flower. I just have a small bed the width of my garage. We're planning to tear the garage down next Spring and build a bigger and better garage - which is probably my excuse to get a bigger and better iris bed! Clematis Miss Bateman in full bloom. I forgot to prune the clematis this spring. This is just a 2 year old plant! Behind the clematis is my daughters art gallery, aka our porch. My 3 year old peonie, flanked by a siberian iris and a japanese iris. I have been waiting 3 years for this peonie to bloom. I only plant white flowers in front of the house, and I am sick sick sick to see a pink bud on it. My only consolation is that I will have a beeautiful pink peonie in a bud vase on my kitchen table real soon. And this peonie will be getting the shovel. Lastly - any idea what this is? I seem to have stumped the people on the Name That Plant forum. I bought these at Weston Nurseries as tulip bulbs.

I just downloaded and uploaded photos for the 1st time in 2 weeks. I doubt I'll get the June thread up tonight - since I want to finish dealing with my photos. But I'll have it up some time tomorow. prairiemoon - I usually buy my clematis from the Middlesex Conservation District. They have a spring plant sale every year. That is where I got Carnaby this year. I'm starting lunaria from seed since I only had 1 little plant - which I stole from somewhere. And I don't have enough patience to wait for it to reseed itself! claire - your comment about Siberian Iris being a weed got me thinking about mine. I've been putting them around the pond. These are the siberian irises I've transplanted - the 3 photos are 1 year old plants, 2 year old plants and 3 year old plants. terrene - what an amazing path of digitalis. I see lots of blossoms forming, but no blooms yet.

Matt, We have some naturalized Kentucky Coffee trees here along our road (but not on our property) where they tend to grow in fencelines that are a mass of bird-planted natives. I like them and they are incredibly drought-tolerant, almost what I'd call droughtproof. In our two worst drought years here (2003 with a little under 19" of rainfall and 2005 with a little over 23" of rainfall) which both were "Exceptional Drought" years, they were about the last plants to show drought stress, with the only plant that was later than them being the prickly pear cacti. If I ever plant a Kentucky Coffee Tree, I'll choose one with no seed pods because the naturalized ones here drop seed pods all over creation. Believe it or not, we've planted so many trees on the once treeless portions of our property that I have to be careful now about planting any more or I'm going to shade all my veggie and fruit growing areas, a problem I'm already having on the western and northern edges of my veggie garden. I'm already having to transition some understory areas from grass to ground covers because those areas now are too shaded for grass. This is fine with me because my ultimate plan has been to shade out all the areas around the house where bermuda grass grows so we don't have to deal with mowing it twice a week for the rest of our lives. We have kept one native grassland area west of the landscaped home-garage area open for the deer and other wildlife, so that would be one place I could plant a tree or two, but I don't want to shade out all the native grassland either. Our 'civilized' parts of our property where the house, garage, yard and gardens are was just a long, narrow open area of long-fallow farm land in between two large wooded areas. When we cleared the brush before building the house, all we kept was 1 large pecan tree, 1 large post oak and a few cedars. We later removed the cedars after we saw what high-risk trees they are in grassland areas where wildfires are somewhat common and, in some years, frequent. At first, we sat here and roasted all summer long in full sunlight while we waited for our tiny trees (most were transplanted from the woods as 8-12" seedlings) to grow. After a dozen years, though, and with native trees that have made amazing growth since we planted them, the yard area is fairly shady nowadays. I'm afraid that from now on, I have to be really careful about planting more trees or we'll end up being too shady and having to remove trees. Darwin, We are on the dividing line too, in Love County which sits right along I-35 with the area east of I-35 seeming more lush and green most of the time (with higher rainfall), compared to the area west of I-35 which seems significantly drier most years (and has several inches less of rain each year) and not nearly as lush and green, especially in dry years. (Our specific place is west of I-35, though not by much.) And to add one important point about trees making good growth---when we moved here, we deliberately choose to transplant teeny-tiny seedling trees from our woodland to the open grassland where we built the house. I believed our trees would grow better and be healthier if they had a root system that was equal to their top growth. We dug the tree seedlings as carefully as we could. In general, we moved oak trees, and a couple of native persimmons and one Mexican Plum and they had 8-12" of topgrowth and the rootball was 12-15" 'tall'. I don't think we started planting trees until 2001 after moving here in 1999 because 1999 and 2000 were severe drought years. We have a two-story house, and almost every one of those teeny-tiny trees are now as tall as the house, and most of them are taller than the house. I am positive we would not have had that kind of growth if we'd started with containerized trees that had a lot of topgrowth in comparison to the small root systems. Our tallest oak tree is a red oak that grew from an acorn 'planted' by a squirrel. I believe it popped up in the shrub bed on the south side of the house in 2002 or 2003. It is easily 4 or 5' taller than the seedling red oaks we transplanted from the woods around the same time or the year before. For anyone interested in propagating native plants, I highly recommend an almost-600 page book by Jill Nokes called "How To Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest". It is an amazing book, and mine is old and dogeared and well-worn. Two books I found very helpful when I was trying to figure out what all the native plants on our land were back after we bought this land in 1997 are by Doyle McCoy and are: "Roadside Wild Fruits of Oklahoma" and "Roadside Trees and Shrubs of Oklahoma". I bought both of them at Barnes & Noble in the OKC area (might have been the one in Norman) in the late 1990s. They were published in 1981 and I don't know if they are still in print, but they have been invaluable in helping me identify all the native plants here. Our house is in a slightly more hospitable area than yours, but not by much, and I think it is only more hospitable because of its proximity to the Red River. Love County is a transitional county, sitting right in the middle of south Central OK and it varies greatly in rainfall with higher rainfall in the eastern portion of the county (ave. of 42" per year) and much less rain in the western portion of the county (ave. of 38" per year). We're right in the middle. I would imagine the western end of our county is very similar to the El Reno area, and it always amazes me how much drier the western portion of our county is. We were out in the western end of our county a couple of weeks ago and even though we were only 15 or 20 miles further west than our home, it was significantly drier and the native plants were 'short' compared to those same plants at our house. So, even though we and they can grow the same exact native trees, they are going to get a lot larger in our part of the county than at the western end of the county, and I think there is an important lesson there. However, they also have sandy soil in the area where we were, and we have red clay that holds water better so I'm sure that accounts for some of the differences in plant growth. It is much harder for young trees to survive/grow during extended periods of drought in fast-draining sand than in clay. I noticed, for example, that the further west you go, the shorter the oak trees. There's also a lot more native cacti out there than here and slight differences in the native grasses....theirs are undoubtedly the more drought-tolerant ones. I noticed they have large stands of sand lovegrass out there that get huge. We have scattered bits of lovegrass here at our place in clay but it doesn't grow as large in the dense clay and it doesn't compete well with taller prairie grasses here like it does further west. We all can learn a lot from native plants compared to more exotic imported ones. At first I tried to plant a lot of landscape plants like hostas and hydrangeas, and they really didn't grow well here in our soil and with our frequent summer droughts. That caused me to quickly convert to native plants, which only made sense. There aren't many non-natives I'll plant any more because they just don't tolerate recurring drought as well. With clay soil, it is even more difficult, though, because I have to select plants that can handle a drought year with 19" of rainfall and temps in the 100s for a long time but which also will tolerate a wet year with 50" of rain, and sometimes 6 to 9 to 12" of rain or more in one day. (Our record one-day rainfall is 12.89" and the soil stayed saturated for weeks.) It can be hard to find plants that tolerate both extremes. Natives, I have found, do tolerate them and that's why that's mostly what we plant on our property. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to look at our property during the drought years and realize that the native plants handle it a thousand times better than the non-native ones. Dawn