I would really like some of this seed. Please let me know if you'd like to do a trade. My list isn't up yet :( but it's going up in the next few days.

I was at a nursery today and asked someone about them. They told me to prune them hard but honestly, I thought they were pretty small after I pruned them in late winter. I have been giving them a relatively lot of water as I was told to do this the first couple years. Maybe I'll try less. I might also try metal supports (you can use for floppy plants) next year before they start to grow. If that doesn't work, I'll probably give up too! It's a shame - they are so lovely before they spread.

Yes, I grow the grey santolina. It's getting very hard to find here, and I have to replace it every few years (like many grey leaf plants in ATL). It doesn't like wet clay, but it loves well drained soils and in particular it loves not having any kind of "splash back" on the leaves - I mulch it with pea gravel. I bet it will look lovely in your garden, it would be super with pink roses!

Good morning Katrina! Cotton root rot is a fungal infection of the soil for which there is no well-known chemical treatment. It is very persistent in the soil and pretty much wiped out the cotton crop once grown in many southern states. Millions of dollars have been spent studying it, but no real solution has been found. One researcher at Texas A&M has had some success in recent years with a combination of encapsulated (slow-release) nitrogen fertilizer in combination with certain commercial fungicides and the addition of various minerals he has found to be deficient in soil infected with cotton root rot. One reason cotton root rot is such a problem is that it is able to lie dormant in the soil for a long time, perhaps many decades. The best solutions are to try to acidify your soil, since it thrives in soils with a pH of 7.0 to 8.5. I have had some success in controlling it, but not eliminating it, by working large amounts of compost, peatmoss, greensand and other amendments into the soil. Using 1 lb. of ammonium sulfate per 100 square feet of soil twice annually helps, but there is no guarantee. Improving drainage also helps, but does not eliminate the fungas. I don't know if hot compost would help. I tried it one year with fresh cow manure, and all I got was every weed known to mankind. :) One of the main treatments for cotton root rot in areas where field crops are grown is to grow various monocots, like sorghum and corn, and till them into the soil once they are mature. This seems to help slow down, but not completely eliminate, the fungal disease. It is not a practical solution for the average landscape, though. Growing up in Texas where the main crop was once cotton, and my daddy's family were once cotton farmers, I knew all about cotton root rot long before I experienced it firsthand myself. When I lived in Fort Worth, I listened to Neil Sperry's radio gardening show from the time he began it in the late 1970s to the time I moved here. Countless times I heard him diagnose certain types of sudden plant death as cotton root rot, and most of the time the gardeners involved simply didn't want to accept his diagnosis--I assume because none of us wants to have a disease in our gardens for which there is no simple cure! When I began planting here and had cotton root rot problems, I was just sick about it. Over the years I have worked hard to improve the soil in the area where I have had the problems, but the cotton root rot still rears its ugly head every now and then. With regards to composted cotton burs, I have never heard of any problems with them being a carrier of cotton root rot. As far as I understand it, the cotton root rot attacks and destroys the roots of affected plants but does not travel up into the plant system. Infected plants die because they can no longer receive nutrition via their now-decimated roots. I think it unlikely that you could ever find any trace of cotton root rot in composted cotton burrs. Cotton is still successfully grown in the High Plains of Texas, and one of the by-products of that plant would be the composted cotton burs. I believe no one in Texas would process and sell those burs if there was any chance whatsoever that cotton root rot could be in them. One of the leading researchers in the area of Cotton Root Rot is Texas A&M University. In reading their data, I have never seen any concern expressed about cotton root rot being transferred via the burs. Cotton root rot seems to be more of a problem in parts of Texas than in Oklahoma, but that doesn't help you if you are in the part of Oklahoma where is has reared its ugly head. Hope this info helps. Dawn