Kitty - I'm pleased to report that the Dwarf Pink Columbine is currently in the process of setting lots of seed! Seed pods are forming all over the plant, and it looks to be a prolific season so far! As soon as the pods ripen, I'll pick lots for you and dry them a bit... and just to be sure you get the pink columbine you desire, I'll dig a small clump from the mother plant and pack it along with the Cerastium! The plant is large enough to separate a portion! Columbine seems to dislike having their roots disturbed, and they tend to wilt terribly when dug... but if I am very careful, I know it will survive the trip and recover. It will lose several leaves to stress, but it should settle in to your garden and come back strong next spring! While I've got my shovel out, is there anything else you'd like?

Gerard, it's this wonderful, precious group of people that keeps me coming back every day! Gardeners are nurturing by nature, but these people are above and beyond! I'm incredibly thankful that I stumbled in here one day to ask a question... because they not only answered me, they welcomed me into the fold and have warmed my heart ever since! From me to you, this is your official "welcome"! I hope you stick around! We share much more than just hippeastrum blooms and gardening tips... we share our lives and families, our pets and homes, and all the other beautiful things we enjoy growing and nurturing! Thank you for sharing your photography! The flowers are wonderful! If you only knew how painful and depressing winters used to be for me... well, that's in the past now... I look forward to winter these days... because I get to share it with this unique group of caring individuals, and their talents with bulbs and digital photography! Welcome! Pull up a keyboard and join us!

Can an overgrown Clematis armandii grow back from severe hard pruning & transplanting at the same time? This plant is approximately 10 years old & stem is as thick as my wrist with peeling bark. Our daughter & son-i-l bought a house & it was there already. Last year pruned after flowering, but it was still too large for the cedar arbor & messy for the path/yard as well as shaded the vegetable garden area in their small yard. They decided they wanted it gone, but I wanted to save it. It was in full bloom today & sad to cut it down because we couldn't save any leaved stems to get it off the trellis. I have several good spots for it that is part shade with good soil & can mulch with compost. Usually watering is only needed during our July-early September dry season. We have the root ball kept moist newspaper & burlap in a barrel sized pot. Would it be best to pot it up with potting soil or put it in the ground to nurture it back to life & encourage buds to sprout?

The fundamentals behind amending of planting holes are basic and across-the-board. It's a simple matter of how movement of water is affected and how this affects the plants. The only variables that have been identified are due to how textures of existing soils affect the situation. Differing types and combinations of amendments do not change the result during organized experiments with controls - if you change the texture of a small area chances are pretty good movement of water into and out of that area will be affected and not in a productive way. Without controls (a duplicate set of matching plants without treatment) there is no way to establish that the treatment produced a superior result to lack of treatment. When amending of planting holes has been tested using control groups a repeated result is that the control groups grew better than those in the amended holes. This has been seen starting almost 40 years ago. So, when I was told to send everyone home with tie-in sales of soil amendments at garden centers I was working in 20 or 30 years ago the concept had already started to be seen to be bogus years beforehand. A "big hole" for a clematis is not a departure from amending of individual planting holes, unless you are talking about a hole 5 or 10 feet across - which, of course, you are not. A 2-foot-wide hole is a small planting hole, that will receive water from surrounding soil if it is heavy and conditions are damp, and will shed it if surrounding soil is light and coarse and/or conditions are dry. I've dug up too many plants sitting in a puddle and too many sitting in a pocket of dust with moist soil all around to have much doubt in the consistency of the factors described by those who have done the research.