If you grow tropical plants and live in Oklahoma, southwestern Missouri, north Texas, western Arkansas, southern Kansas, western Louisiana, southeastern Colorado or anywhere people love growing tropical plants please join us at Myriad Botanical Gardens and Crystal Bridge on November 21 at 1:00 PM. Anyone and everyone is welcome to come and bring your tropical plant loving friends for a great tour of the garden! The Myriad Gardens has a fabulous collection of tropical plant species including more than 100 palm species, a collection of Cycads, Gingers, Bromeliads, Orchids and aroid species including Philodendron, Anthurium, Alocasia as well as the exotic Amorphophallus titanum. This meeting is sponsored by the members of the International Aroid Society that live the region but our goal is to meet people that love tropical plants! Although we grow and love aroids almost all of us love to grow plants from the rain forests of the world. We just want to meet people with an interest similar to our own. Technically this is the first meeting of the MidAmerica Chapter of the International Aroid Society but you don't have to join or be a member to join us for the tour of the garden. We've been told there is a good possibility that Dr. Tom Croat who is the world's leading aroid botanist as well as the P.A. Schulze Curator of Botany at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis is hoping to be able to join us. Dr. Croat has personally collected more than 100,000 wild specimens in rain forests around the world for scientific purposes and has named many new species to science. This will be a great chance to meet Tom and ask questions. Since he is a personal friend I can assure you find him a warm and kind gentleman besides the fact he is the world's leading expert in his field! We'll be updating this post once we have a confirmation. Some of us will be bringing plants and cuttings to trade and we encourage you to do the same. Please bring anything you would like to share with other tropical plant enthusiasts since there will almost certainly be something there you'll want to bring home. For more information, check out the chapter page at http://www.aroid.org/midamerica/ Please RSVP to Zach DuFran zach at zachandchristie.com or to Steve Lucas at Steve@ExoticRainforest.com Admission to the Myriad Center is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and $3 children). If you've never been to the garden the Myriad Gardens website is http://www.myriadgardens.com/ Here is a link that might be useful: Myriad Center

Well, I feel like the neighbors have our house bugged! DH came home from work last night and we were talking about the dog and suddenly the barking stopped. Then, around 9:00 PM the neighbor had a light on and was building something in the yard and the dog was out there yipping some, but at least he was, apparently, nearby. Now it is almost 9:00 AM here and NO DOG IN SIGHT. Hmmmm. How ironic that on a WORK DAY the poor thing seems to be indoors? WELL -- if that poor thing is out there endlessly again I will call animal control. Faye, you may be right -- just because they want to know who we are doesn't mean they'll tell the neighbors. We have two small dogs of our own and that's where we were afraid of retaliation. When we are gone the pups have access to the back yard -- DH said "All they'd have to do is open the gate..." Not that we have any reason to think they are THAT weird! Glass -- that is UN believable -- I just don't understand why people like that get animals. And then when they realize they don't give a care -- why they keep them. It's sick.

I forgot to mention in my first post that they also have a ton of granite vanities for amazing prices, plus undermount white sinks for $29. (All bathroom stuff so I know I'm OT here ;) You're right, smiling Judy - I might need to change my screen name. I do love blue...I just overdid it in my kitchen! anita

I love looking at this forum because there are so many talented, plant loving folks here. I have been reading a book called Lab Girl, which is a memoir about a scientist with a focus on botany and I keep thinking some of you would LOVE it. I am truly blown away by the quality of her writing and the way she writes about trees in particular. It is lyrical, yet scientific. She makes the most amazing metaphorical connections between the natural world of plants and her own journey through life. Fascinating. So if you want a good read, check it out. I haven't finished it yet, (and don't want to because it's SO good) so I can't speak to the complete book. But I am savoring every page.