I grow A. pavia and A. glabra, and A. pavia do bloom quite young. Most of my progeny bloom a season after they leave the pots and situated in ground and are unstressed. I have not seen the same thing in the A. glabra or flava.

Sandy, I had never even heard of Butter and Eggs before just reading the name here on the forum. I think someone else (I forget, maybe it was you) and I thought then I wonder what that is. Now I know. I want to get buckeyes here, but oh my, if it's invasive, I just don't know about planting it here. So I wonder if the buckeyes will lay eggs on any of the hybrid snapdragons? I forget exactly which I planted but I'm sure it's not a wild kind. Susan, I'm so happy that you got cats on the plantain and the violets. At least one of us did. lol Actually, I guess I obviously must get cats on the violets here since I have so many fritillaries, but I don't notice them because our lawn has probably a few thousand violets in it. Can you picture me looking at all of them to see if there are frit cats on them? Ha. I don't think my back could take it and I'd have to do it sitting down just like I do my gardening. Honestly, it's literally a pain to go out and collect Monarch eggs because of having to bend over to look under the leaves. I've considered quitting it, but then I think of the spiders possibly getting at the eggs/cats. I don't actually know if they eat the eggs or wait until they hatch and then get them. I know that I found more than just one or two plants with evidence of a cat having hatched but it was nowhere to be found. Since there was a spider on the plant, I assume that it had gotten the cat, and that is why I feel compelled to bring in the eggs even though it gets to my back. I'm glad that my planting is almost done. I was going to plant the last 20 milkweeds outside today in my milkweed patch, but it's raining. That's okay, we need it. The plants will have at least two months to get a good root system before we get a frost, so that should be okay. I just can't believe how tall those Swamp Milkweeds got already this year after having just sown the seeds last fall! I'm talking about the ones I planted in containers; I don't know why the ones in the ground didn't come up, so I used my extras in the containers to plant down there. We finally got the cage up yesterday. I don't have anybody in it yet, but they will be soon. Our daughter is at the beach with a friend or I'd have taken a picture of the cage. I wanted to wait until after she gets back to put some caterpillars in it. I don't actually have a whole lot of them right now. I have 7 that will pupate with the next few days, 8 that are about 1" long, 6 smaller ones, and sheesh, at least 130 eggs...unless some of those hatched by now; I haven't even gotten a chance to check yet. Saturday really made that count high since I found 93 that day. Geez, if all of those pupate on the same day, won't I be busy! I thought it was great last year when I released a dozen on one day. This year is really busy and there is no way I would raise all of these in individual containers. I really think I would go batty. Believe it or not, I do have other things to do besides raise Monarchs. Ha, I don't know what hubby would say about that though. Things get neglected around here when the Monarchs are here. Oh, and I can't be your muse if you're mine! :) I wasn't worried about the cherries. I have been so busy with planting other things that I was beginning to think that I'd never get done, but I finally see light at the end of the tunnel...only 20 Swamp Milkweed left to plant outside, some transplanting of milkweed from small pots into bigger ones, and a few odds and ends one to do yet but nothing major. If I wouldn't have had to dig all the sod by hand with a trowel, I'd have been done two months ago. I like to plant things, but I really got carried away this year and took on more than I probably should have but oh well, I lived to tell about it. :) Cathy

I just recently planted some Ruellia humilis (the native petunia up here) for the same reason! I want buckeyes to use my plant to lay eggs on! A small Buckeye was one of my first butterflies this year. Right now though, it's like there's a bubble over top of me...I see hardly anything. An occasional skipper or cabbage white...but other than that, nadda. Really weird. As for cameras, I used Amazon to read the reviews and took those with a grain of salt. IMHO, there's too many people that think a bad photo is a good photo and so give a good review of a not so good camera. There's also a lot of people that simply want it on auto, just point and shoot. It's also hard to find reviews about the macro setting on-line. I researched on-line, then headed to Best Buy. I went to Wal-Mart, but the majority of their cameras were really low end and didn't have batteries in them, so I couldn't play with them at all. The person in that dept. wasn't too helpful, not willing to put in batteries, didn't know anything about the different cameras, etc. etc. I wish you good luck in your search!

Those orchids look like the blooms on hesperaloe coming up out of the ground, seems like the deer would chomp them down, do they? Pink asparagus (deer candy) About that important seed in your pocket, I always like surprises of finding a plant I thought failed or that I didn't have. This year my surprise was two sand penstemons (P. ambiguus) volunteers that showed up when I was trimming back grasses. I was very upset that my one and only plant had died last year, the one started years ago from seed I'd purchased from PoSW. This is my absolute favorite penstemon and I always saved every seed and sowed a lot of them by hand and tossed all the rest in that area but for some reason its not too successful from seed, unlike the other types. Last fall I'd planted the last saved seed in pots left outside and ended up with zero plants. I CAREFULLY moved one of the plants to a choice spot since it was hiding under a large grass. So far so good. It blooms for almost three months and is gorgeous, flowers so brightly white they are like porcelain. You mentioned Yucca glauca elsewhere and how pretty the bloom is, I agree with that. We have a lot of them coming up on the land we own out by Norman, in fact they are quite common in Oklahoma. Twice I've dug a few tubers, planted them and then dug them back out again. With my space issues I always rethink it and then decide I don't need it. Partly the plants don't look all that great unless they are growing in a big field where they form large colonies with lots of dead yucca leaves but even so, its good contrast in the grasses because they are the same height and those stiff spikes just look fantastic as you look across a field. They look great blooming from a distance but up close they look like a good place for rats to nest in.