I guess I should add that my Live oak "late drop" is likely dead. I held out hope for a while. I pruned down to where I saw green on the trunk. Now it is a wait and see. One of my "late drops" is growing from a sprout on the lower trunk of a tree I planted last spring. Well, I should just say that in a harsh or "real" zone 6 winter, the live oak "late drop" are just a bit too tender. They are however the "hardiest" Live oak out there. In zone 6b they would likely do great, or a 6 a winter that isn't like the last one. Yes, the last one was a "real" zone 6 winter. Come on global warming!!!!! Sorry I've had a few beers. I should shut up now.

Palmcoastgardener...Thank you! It is such a 'behaved' plant too with the scapes not growing here and there. Not like the other reds (holland hybrids) that I have that would grow bigger flowers on very tall scapes that would eventually bend and need to be staked. By the way, may I post your beautiful Evergreen pic in the "Evergreen" post? That is just breathtaking!!! Cindee...I have tried to acquire all available Hadeco varieties. All of them are good performers. I have thanked Mr.CB about this...having these beautiful cultivars available to us. Hadeco deserves so much more credit than I do. I just take their flower's pics. :-) I do wish I can sell some of my pics so I can buy more bulbs...LOL!!!

Lucky you! Get ready for a magical experience. By far the best place in all of South Africa for gardeners is the Cape Town area. First, it's where Kirstenbosch is located...one of the foremost botanical gardens in the world. But, best of all, is the area south of Cape Town, where you can take day trips to drive through the Fynbos ecosystem, a truly unique biome. The drive down the coast is magnificent and there are incredible species growing wild by the roadside...Proteas, Moraeas and many others. The national park at the Cape of Good Hope is spectacular for its diversity. And just a little further down the road (ask any local) you can find an amazing community of Jackass Penguins. Also, don't miss the drive up to the top of Table Mountain...it's Protea heaven. In addition to the Kirstenbosch web site (use your search engine), you should also check out the site for the ARC (South African Agricultural Research Council). They have several research centers that are doing innovative work on ornamental and endangered species. You might even be able to arrange visits to their research centers just outside of Cape Town and Pretoria. (I did and enjoyed every minute!)

I found this article about roses and drought: http://paulzimmermanroses.com/care/summer-care/should-you-water-your-roses-during-a-drought/ The roses in my personal garden haven’t been watered in over a decade. And that includes during a drought. but then I read this in our rose breeder's newsletter: http://www.ludwigsroses.co.za/newsletter/ The way trees drink Scientists who study forests say they’ve discovered something disturbing about the way prolonged drought affects trees. It has to do with the way trees drink. They don’t do it the way we do — they suck water up from the ground all the way to their leaves, through a bundle of channels in a part of the trunk called the xylem. The bundles are like blood vessels. When drought dries out the soil, a tree has to suck harder. And that can actually be dangerous, because sucking harder increases the risk of drawing air bubbles into the tree’s plumbing. Plant scientist Brendan Choat explains: “As drought stress increases, you have more and more gas accumulating in the plumbing system, until they can’t get any water up into the leaves. This is really bad news for the plant because this is like having an embolism in a human blood vessel.” Like a human embolism, the gas bubbles stop the flow of fluid. If that persists, it means thirst, starvation and eventually death. Choat is from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, a region that has seen years of record-breaking drought. He wondered: How much drought does it take before trees start choking on air bubbles? He and a team of researchers studied 226 species of trees around the world, including desert trees, rain forest trees and many others. They discovered that for most, it doesn’t take much drought at all. “So this is the key thing,” Choat says, “that it would only take a small shift in terms of the moisture environment, the temperature … to push these plants across the threshold.” The threshold between drinking and choking, that is. The reason there’s so little margin of error is that trees have to finely balance eating and drinking. To eat, they open holes in their leaves, called stomata, to absorb carbon dioxide. But the more they do that, the more they lose water by transpiration through the stomata. Lose too much, and they have to start sucking harder — and risk a deadly embolism. Choat’s research, in the journal Nature, shows that it doesn’t take much drought before trees start to self-destruct. But what about trees that have evolved to live in really hot, dry places? They’re sippers, not gulpers. Plant scientists like Bettina Engelbrecht figured they’d have a larger margin of safety before they choke. “Instead,” she says of Choat’s research, “we find, well, it’s all the same — everyone is right at the edge and has a very risky strategy.” Engelbrecht, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, studies rain forest trees. “Now, we have to worry about all of them,” she says. “We have to really deal with the problem at the global scale.” That’s because temperatures are rising around the globe. That makes drought more likely and more intense. Big droughts have hit southern Europe, Russia, Australia and the U.S. in recent years. The first 10 months of 2012 were the warmest ever in the continental U.S. Along with the heat came widespread drought, which still persists in the Southwest. Nathan McDowell, a plant scientist at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, actually puts trees under plastic to see how they deal with less water and more heat. He says trees are adaptable, up to a point. “Now we’re changing that climate range really fast,” he notes, “faster than any of the living plants here have experienced. So can they change fast enough to adapt to that? You know, the preponderance of evidence right now is saying that [at] lots of locations around the world, they’re not adapting fast enough.” When they don’t adapt, they stop growing. Beetles and other insects invade. If droughts last long enough, the forests just die, and get replaced with something else. Please help me to understand this Straw.... What I've noticed in the past with severe droughts myself is that once a plant has reached it's threshold no amount of water can make it grow and live again...and if it does, it is usually riddled with all kinds of fungal (and other) diseases and bad insects. How can not watering your roses during a drought be a good thing, as stated in the site on the top?