I'm opening them alright, but I can't post to the 'coldest temps' thread. So here's what I wrote for that...just a test to see if I can post here... I'm not sure how my husband got the flowers to the wedding without them freezing, since the car certainly never got warm that day. Fortunately, we were poor college students and just had carnations--they are certainly hardier than many flowers usually used for weddings. One Valentine's day before we were married, he walked to the florist's and bought me a rose, and then walked back with it. It was a long time before I had the heart to tell him that it was frozen solid and turned black and fell apart the minute it thawed out. He hasn't bought me many roses since! I was just in Fairbanks for the weekend--the flowers were beautiful, but the smoke was awful. It was good to get home. Right now I'm in the house taking a break from the heat outside. It's relatively cool in the house at 81 degrees. It's 80 in the shade, and 97 in the sun. I didn't take the thermometer out til just now...who knows how hot it was earlier. Unforturnately, I'm redoing the strawberry bed, and it is in the sun all day. Right now it is 100.8 on the front deck. And I did not set the thermometer in direct sun. Not good weather for transplanting strawberries!

Embo, I had thought about that. But it grew this way even when it was in a big 5 gallon pot for a couple years before planting outside. I really doubt that was infested with a high titer of root rot organisms; as I've pointed out before, even rather sensitive plants like Rhododendron rex will survive in a pot around here (and grow) it's when they are planted out that problems begin. And a lot of the pictures you can find on the internet show the plants looking like this. (the ones Karen posted were exceptions!) Contrast, with, for example, Don Wallace's Rhododendron hybrid 'Cloudburst'. Certainly not bred for east coast conditions. Came rooted cutting size 3.5 years ago, was put in a slightly smaller pot (maybe 3 gallon) and sized up impressively. I happen to know I always placed them right next to each other in my jungle of pots...because they were the big ones that were placed towards the back. If there was some extremely virulent pathogen around, it should have affected that as well...or any of the 20 other rhododendrons in the vicinity. (Sadly 'Cloudburst' died in the big Jan 2018 freeze here) Finally, there's no dying back, it's just a refusal to make significant growth. Any other plants I've had with root rot here, will at least grow vigorously during spring, until they keel over in the summer. Something like 'Biskra' put out shoots when it was mild in April, but dies within a couple weeks of it getting hot. This obviously hasn't done that. Maybe it's a side effect of micro-propagation that will wear off eventually? OTOH, we know at least one of the parents is extremely prone to root rot...so it is something I'm going to be concerned about, long term, with this plant.

Mike, you mentioned that you could post more than one photo, I've never seen that option or a way to grab several of them. I've only been able to insert one photo at a time, although I've been using the House Photo button (and then dragging my pic into the box) because in the past the Photo button didn't work so I got used to using the alternate way. Just a gripe, I get notifications to my phone, which I did allow thinking it would be for when people comment or like threads, but Houzz has added in their own notifications of sales or design stuff. Ugg, so annoying. -Nancy

Very interesting. I went to another rose discussion to test. First time I clicked on a photo: white rectangle with black circle appeared for an instant, then the photo, enlarged, replaced it. White rectangle with black circle did not persist. X’ing out the photo and repeating process resulted in just enlarged photo.