Thank You all. I think I will dead head a few Sweet Williams and leave some for seedheads. (gotta collect seeds) In my experience sweet williams did not bloom the first year. They were worth the wait though. I did do some deadheading on the cosmos but will stop. I'd rather get seeds this year than a rebloom. next year I can have 2 plots and experiment. This years crop of ws flowers is just extrodinary !! The only thing I lost was snapdragons and some Zinnias due to too much rain .(gardener error again) Kathy

Martin, I also wonder sometimes if too much is read into an author's intentions and sometimes a rose is just a rose. At the end of my copy of LOTF, Golding is quoted as saying that the entire book is symbolic in nature except for the very last scene in which the boys are rescued. Also, it says (which lends strength to cjoseph's mention of the Greek interpretation of Simon and the pig's head) that Golding listed his hobbies as thinking, classical Greek, sailing, and archeology and that his literary influences included Euripides. Very interesting. My impression is that the boys' plane was shot down during WWII, and that the parachutist was a victim of the same war because in the first page or so of Chapter Six, it says, ".....but there were other lights in the sky, that moved fast, winked, or went out, though not even a faint popping came down from the battle fought at ten miles' height. But a sign came down from the world of grownups, though at the time there was no child awake to read it. There was a sudden bright explosion and corkscrew trail across the sky....." and then the parachutist's body eventually landed on the island. I'm still puzzling over what happened to the child with the birthmark. I'm thinking that he is even mentioned again close to the end of the book and that no one knows what happened to him. Was he the victim of someone like Roger, perhaps? That doesn't seem to make sense since the boys were still restricted in some ways by the bonds of civilization. Did he wander off during the night and fall into the ocean? I guess I'll never know. It doesn't keep me from wondering, though!

I finally got around to looking at it and it's fine and pumping out lots of new growth which is red. I guess the brown colour really threw me and two of the shoots seemed flaccid. (Maybe it was just the heat that caused it). When I touched the thorns and found them soft, I recalled what people here had been discussing with RRD and panicked! Many thanks for all the reassurance :) Linda

I don't think you can hurt Wm. Baffin. Mine has been whacked almost to the ground, pruned leaving only 3 main canes, left unpruned for years, you name it, and it doesn't seem to care. I would just clean it up, removing all the dead canes and prune the remaining canes to just above a good node or set of leaves, shaping it as you prune, give it a shovel full of compost or manure, and let it regain it's height. It'll leaf out again.