monsoon99, thanks you very much for your compliment on my Iceberg roses shown on my blog! Actually I don't do anything special, except that we have really bad dirt and therefore we dig big holes (up to 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep) for the roses and replace the soil, aehhhh stones, with organic soil for rose planting. I know you are usually not supposed to do that but we have no choice and it seems to work in my garden. Besides that I fertilize them regularly with organic fertilizer for roses and once they get organic alfalfa meal in spring and mulch with compost up to 3 inch high if possible. And then last but not least they get watered well. I don't spray and completely garden organically. Most of my roses grow on their own-roots and are not grafted and that seem to work best in my yard. I noticed that in general the roses become more healthy and bloom more prolifically over the years. The Iceberg roses are 3 years old now. I am thinking of writing about rose fertilizing and rose care in general and go into a little bit more detail on my blog. Maybe you want to stay tuned? Forgot to mention in my previous comment about the salvias that the photos in this thread are awesome. Thanks everyone for posting. That is really enabling! Christina Here is a link that might be useful: Organic Garden Dreams

ccroulet keep posting about the Ca. sages, they are my favorite salvias and it's good to hear about kinds to try even if I don't get around to posting on the threads you mentioned. That said our S. pachyphylla is blooming now, late spring its normal time here in the desert southwest and by July and August it is basically dormant along with S. Clevlandii and S. Dorrii as dicot said. I have no idea what it would do in an area with milder summers however, maybe it would just put on new growth and flowers later in the season. Maria

The climate in the two localities I've visited is dry in summer, except for the very occasional summer thunderstorm, and nights are cool, usually below 50 deg F. Mid-summer frost is possible. Most days are clear and sunny. Day-night temperature swings of at least 40 deg F would be usual. If you can get into Western U.S. Historical Climate Summaries, the data for Big Bear Lake, CA, would be typical.

I've only seen the S.B. Mtns. S. pachyphyllas in May & June. We visited the Santa Rosa Mtns. plants in July 23, 2008. You have to be prepared to take the dirt road that goes up to near the summit. When we were up there in 2008, there was an especially big patch of S. pachyphylla at about 7100 ft. elev. They were spectacular! I think anyone interested in growing Calif. native plants should attempt to see them in nature. It gives you a better idea of what they need, and it gives you a better idea of what the plant really looks like. Most commercial growers don't bother to do this, and therefore they don't know that, for example, most "Cleveland Sage" in the trade are really hybrids with S. leucophylla. Cuttings get passed from grower to grower without anyone realizing that they aren't quite what they think they are. Readers of my old posts here know that this is a regular hobby horse of mine :) WRT San Felipe Cr.: I've always been pretty well convinced that the Shelter Valley development sucked up all of the water in the aquifer. After the wells went in in the 1960s or 70s, most of the trees died. There were also large ponds with frogs and turtles at the top of Sentenac Canyon. A long-time naturalist with ABDSP told me the ponds were scoured out by a big flood, maybe in 1998, but the frogs and turtles were long gone by then. In the 1960s I remember a good-sized permanent pond with frogs underneath the Scissors Crossing bridge. The cottonwoods and willows immediately upstream were a dense thicket.