I sure don't see any veneer there. Esp. the drawer fronts. I could just about see elm, too. But it's very uncommon to see furniture in elm, short of slab Hitchcock chair seats. I'd expect chestnut to have a finer grain. And not all of it has to be wormy! Once the trees started dying en masse, there were wormy standing dead trees to be used, but before the Great Chestnut Blight, the wood was sound. Casey

Well, it doesn't take quality, work ethics or skill to grow garlic, just a pot full of dirt or a piece of soil. Plant it in the fall, let it over-winter. By the next summer you'll have scapes to cut and by July (at least here in Michigan), you dig the stuff. Dry it and it'll store for months. It's by far the easiest, most reliable and least labor intensive stuff I've ever grown. Elery says we should grow a field full of it, if we only had a market for it! I also heard the same kind of "employee" argument from the vice-president of a power company here, they hired a bunch of people from India to run the computer systems because there was "no one qualified" here. Big headlines about how much better customer service would be with all the "improvements" to the computer system. Two years later the computer system was a complete mess, everyone was ticked off, people were getting exorbitant and incorrect bills, it cost $6.95 if you wanted to pay your bill on line (!!) the head of IT was fired and some computer experts from University of Michigan were hired. Six months later the computer system worked, the customers were calming down and getting their own bills, and it cost nothing to pay on line. It's a shame how those computer engineers were "unqualified", which actually meant they wanted more money than the foreign workers did. Annie

Try posting this on the Name That Plant forum - there's some pretty sharp cookies that frequent that forum and you should get a potential ID lickety-spllt. I know enough to confirm it is NOT wisteria :-) btw, you may not want to attempt wisteria from seed. It takes a very long time - 10-20 years - for seed grown wisteria to bloom. Look for grafted plants at the nursery.

Embothrium, yeah the leaves too, look alike there. Portlandmysteryrose, thanks for the comments on Perle d'Or and Cecile B., I love CB, wish I could find it here :( I tried to find some common link between them and Old Blush, but there seems to be none. Still, I wonder what makes them produce leaves like that. All of the bushes, in different locations, are easily recognizable by the foliage alone. As a matter of fact, when I collected cuttings of it, I collected of some others too and had them in a vase for a day or two without flowers, when I got time to plant them, I tried to sort them by varieties. And these were the only ones I can say with 100 percent certainty are well-sorted. I have found and collected Mrs Dudley Cross before, and in most sources describing it in depth, they make note of the unusual foliage. But it's not the case for Old Blush, it seems. Nik, I'm curious, what makes a china rose? I'm not saying it isn't, just want to know so I can identify others when/if I stumble upon them. It does seem to be Old Blush, now by several people's criteria. Thank you guys!