I'm very sorry for your loss. The issue with your rose is you have it planted in a ceramic pot on a concrete surface in a very hot environment. Ceramic and clay pots are cooking utensils. Corning Ware is ceramic and, like that beautiful blue pot, is extreme efficient at cooking anything inside it. That concrete surface is a marvelous solar collector as are the stucco walls probably surrounding the area. They absorb and radiate the heat marvelously and for many hours after the sun moves from shining directly on them. The ceramic pot absorbs that radiated heat as well as the direct sunshine on it extremely well, then also continues radiating it internally. Effectively, there is no difference between a ceramic pot on a hot masonry surface and against a hot wall and a Corning Ware utensil on a range burner. The photos of the rose show it has cooked, literally. No amount of water is going to alleviate the heat extremes from those surfaces and that pot. DO NOT give it anything but water. Period. ALL fertilizers are, or become, salts which draw water from the stressed plant and replace it with salts. That will only make matters worse and can very easily push the plant over the edge to death. The first thing you must do is get that poor plant out of the "oven" in which it sits. You know how hot that area gets and how long it remains hot. Go outside bare footed and see. Stand close to the walls and see how much heat radiates from them, even after the sun moves from them. The plant needs a serious heat reduction, particularly to the soil area, the pot. Hopefully, there is somewhere you can slip it inside other shrubbery where no sun will shine on the pot and the plant will be sheltered from any heat being reflected and radiated from any stucco or concrete surfaces. There are still some small green stems which MIGHT have the chance of surviving if the plant can be moved from being cooked. The standard will never be full as it was originally as too much of the head, the budded part on top, has been killed. Your best hope is to limp it along until the weather cools, encouraging it to put out some new growth, from which you may root or bud new plants. That particular standard, if it lives, will probably have two straggly stems coming from the trunk. That is, if there is enough of the trunk still alive to provide the necessary sap flow to support them. Every part of the plant that's black is already dead. They won't resurrect. Hopefully, there is enough viable tissue remaining in the trunk and below those green stems to permit them to put out some growth. If you wish to grow potted roses on a hot patio in that climate, you will be best off using as large a pot as you can possibly handle. At least 22" in diameter would be best. It takes a lot longer for a six quart pot to boil on the range than it does for a one quart. The larger the soil ball, the greater the insulation the soil provides to the center where the crown of the plant lives. Of course, the roots which grow closer to the pot sides will suffer more heat damage, faster than the crown of the plant. Please don't use ceramic or clay pots as they will cook the plants. You will be much better off thinking of any pot as an ice chest. You need materials which insulate against heat such as wood, foam, fiberglass, concrete, even heavy plastic, particularly if it is double wall construction with air space between the inner and outer surfaces. It is basically like insulating your walls and using dual pane windows to keep out the heat. If you must use glazed ceramic or terra cotta, then use the largest size you can find and wrap the interior with many layers of bubble wrap or thin sheets of Styrofoam, basically turning the pot into an ice chest by insulating the interior against the heat. I had a client here who lived in Agua Dulce, CA, in the mid California desert. It gets hot there, but not AS hot as what you and your rose endure. After I explained to him why the plants against his southern facing, white stucco wall failed, he went out on a hundred degree day and reported back that he measured 130F air temperature, one foot from that wall while the sun was shining directly on it. Your situation is guaranteed to be MUCH more extreme than that. If you have windows which reflect sunlight on the pots or plants, that exacerbates the problem greatly. The glass functions like a magnifying glass or mirror, focusing the heat, causing it to be even hotter than direct sun rays. I have that issue here along the south side of the house. The sun reflects off treated glass windows in the living room, cooking every plant anywhere near where the reflected rays hit the ground. NOTHING will grow in that area, no matter how much water or mulch is used. A few feet in either direction, where the reflected rays don't reach, plants survive, but the closer to the focused reflection they grow, the more burned they get. I hope you can find somewhere to put the plant out of that heat misery, where you can keep it watered until it shows whether it can survive or not. I also hope it does live and you are able to propagate plants from it so you are able to keep pieces of your fiance's rose in your garden. Good luck. Kim

Posted by karyn1 MD 7 (bhkalen@aol.com) on Sat, Sep 1, 07 at 16:15 My Meyer lemon fruit has been on the tree since late last fall and is just now turning yellow. It's about the size of a baseball and smooth. I pruned off most of the fruit and only left a couple because the tree is so small. The buds have purple stripes on the on the outside but open completely white. Karyn The fruit on my Meyer lemon has been slowly growing since last November, too. The fruit suddenly started turning yellow about 2 weeks ago when the nightime temps fell into the 50's. My tree is around 3 yrs old and has 2+ dozen lemons. The fruit is already bigger than the Meyer lemons I purchased in the super market.

It's very very nice........love the landscaping and love all the pictures but I always like to see peoples nightime pictures with the lights and fire pits, torches and such. Two questions........what area of the country are you? So much of your landscaping looks like what we have in the northwest. And, is your spa a fiberglass inground, or a gunite? Thanks for sharing your pictures. Kurt

Hello all, We are still swimming here in Southern California. I got the pool up to 83 degrees last week with solar heating only and the kids were swimming very happily. We should have another small heat wave coming next week with temperatures in the eighties again. I have never looked at the weather report as much as the last few weeks since the pool was done. njfolks: The stone is called Red Mountain. Mostly grey with some beautiful rust colors here and there. All the stone (flag and stacked) is that same stone. I had them replace several pieces on the flag stone that was flaking badly - but the rest has been fine. As with any stone, there will be a few bad pieces here and there. Just make sure they don't install those pieces. I wish I could take credit for the design - but it was the builder's designer who made our smaller yard into all that entertainment space. Here are some nightime pictures of the fire pit: