This has been a fascinating post for me as a biologist. I have so much trouble buying plants because I want to just go by Genus species name, but I can hardly ever find a good label that has that on it. Also lots of confusion with the way the cultivars are named. It drives me nuts and I can see how it would drive a casual gardener even more nuts. There's a lot of variables to buying good plants. How and where they were grown, were they shipped, how, where, what's the soil been like for them, how were they transplanted, how were they cared for, how were they bred. You can run into trouble in any number of areas--or not. For example, right now I have some type of horrible wilt that I think came into my garden last year from tomato plants I got at Home Depot. Meanwhile, I have a japanese maple I got MAIL ORDER from a reputable nursery recommended to me on GW japanes maple forum, it came in a cardboard box, looked like a stick version of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, I planted it late over Thanksgiving weekend during an extended fall season that year, but had zero expectations for it. And yet is is growing like gangbusters, which I attribute to good breeding!! On the other hand, I have bought scraggly looking somewhat pot bound (not to the extreme) versions of what I know to be hardy plants at K-Mart and they are doing fine. You have to know what you are doing--what is hardy, what is not, what is a good price and what is not. I once bought a whole flat of scraggly looking basil and a closeout sale at a nursery for 3.50, I figured if any of them lived it would be fine. Almost all did, since they were small and basil is an hardy annual that can recover. On the other hand, some of my local nurseries get their shrubs all hopped up on fertilizer and when you buy them and install them they soon poop out--a lot of nitrogen means lush leaf growth but weak overall structure. And sometimes all it takes is one stoned high school summer assistant to totally screw up a local nursery if they're not careful. Still, IMHO, if you can find a local nursery where they really love plants and take pride in what they do, you will not be sorry. Somehow, Monrovia just does not cut the mustard with me, marketing hype rarely means real quality, because producers of real quality do not need to advertise, they get their business by word of mouth. As for the big boxes, I have gotten some good deals there, but I am getting kinda wary, espcially after my wilt experience with HD. Pots of tomatoe seedlings seemed like a no brainer at the time. I have no absolute proof they vectored the wilt, they are just the most likely suspects since they all had it last year and the wilt spread to that area of the garden.

We lived in the SF Bay Area when I was growing up. (Gorgeous Garter Snakes there! A colorful kind too which are only in SF, they're endangered! We used to see them all the time when I was little, they're so pretty!) Anyway, my mom was tending her artichokes, and later that night, A HUGE black scorpion fell out of her hair!!!! We freaked, she was hysterical, my dad smooshed it, and it didn't sting anyone thank goodness! In the Santa Cruz Mountains where we had a cabin there were these awful, huge, gross, yellow spotted banana slugs that would hang out in the garden, I think they stung too. They are UC Santa Cruz's Mascot. Stepping on a snail barefoot. There are tons of them in the Bay Area, along with Black Widows. The Black Widows get huge too! They are so scary looking, all shiny & black with the red violin on their back! We did have Praying Mantis' though, they were so cool looking, and were great to keep on the Rose Bushes to eat all the aphids. I moved to Washington two years ago, and I have never had such a Garden Enemy as the slugs we have here. They are horrible! It is amazing how much defoliation can occur in one night from these things! They are all different colors, black, brown, spotted, they are hairy, and some look like they have armour on. I hate them! During the growing season I do, "Slug Patrol," every night. I fill a large baggie almost every night with them. It's fun to pour salt in the baggie and watch them melt. They are disgusting!!!!!! I hate them! Here is a link that might be useful: San Francisco Garter Snake

Well, I don't want to speak badly of my family, friends, coworkers, or Santa Claus, but I didn't get a new compost bin, any new magazine subscriptions (except for the Organic Gardening subscription that I can't get them to cancel in spite of my numerous requests as a result of their increase in price), gift certificates to any catalogs or gardening stores, set of hand trucks, rolls of green velcro, packages of rooting hormone, expensive seed catalogs, home-raked pine straw, compost or manure, and I certainly didn't get a truck. However, one night I arrived home from work to find a very large bag of freshly collected pecans hanging on the gate. I live in a neighborhood where you wouldn't really expect a gift bag to still be there if someone left it outside your house, so this little surprise was doubly exciting. It came from a fellow gardener in our new community garden. And then a couple of days after Christmas I got a late present in the mail from my sons. It was a book, The FeederWatcher's Guide to Bird Feeding, which has turned out to be a very lovely book that has given me all sorts of new ideas about attracting birds to my yard. I guess I vaguely, on some level, knew that someone was counting birds, but apparently every year on certain days the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and several other major groups of bird lovers like the Audubon Society and others coordinate their efforts with birdwatchers and birdfeeders all over the continent to identify and count birds. This book draws from the personal experience of all those people to provide firsthand advice about the best practices of birdfeeding. I have learned so much in such a short time by reading this book, and even just by looking at the pictures I've gotten so many ideas. (To tell the truth, looking at some of the pictures makes me feel sort of stupid that I didn't think of some of those ideas myself. Some of the birdfeeder plans seem so darned obvious!) Anyway, immediately after reading this book, I went out into my neighborhood and started collecting discarded Christmas trees (I'm up to 7 now - of course IF I HAD A TRUCK I could have many more) and leaned them against the trunks of my oak and sweetgum and dogwood trees because I didn't have any conifers in my yard and the book said most birds really love conifers. Would you believe that within a couple of hours my yard was filled with birds, including the first woodpeckers I've seen this season - three of them at once? It was amazing. That convinced me I needed to plant some conifers, so I went shopping at Habersham Gardens, where much to my surprise they were having their annual Boxing Day sale which I never knew about before now - everything in the store was on sale, some things up to 75 percent off, and I got some incredible deals including two beautiful shrubs, a juniper salicicola 'Brodie' and a cypress "laredo cadelabra' both of which are supposed to be columnar in habit which is necessary for my small yard. The birds seem to like them already. I also went up to Hastings where they were having a good sale and found a very pretty little eucalyptus whose tag was half broken off but which I think I have finally been able to identify as eucalyptus gunnii. The birds have been landing on it, too, although it's still in its pot as I haven't decided yet whether it's ok to dig up my entire front yard to make an herb garden with this little tree as its centerpiece (I realize it won't remain "little" for long unless I keep cutting it back). And I splurged on a Black Beauty elderberry - also for the birds, I keep telling myself. And I found lots of cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli and rutabaga plants, all of which seemed still to be viable, for pennies, for our community garden, as well as a really healthy-looking thornless blackberry bush for the same place. In any event, I feel like the sale prices I found at Habersham and Hastings were wonderful Christmas presents, and the book my sons sent was a great gardening gift. So although Santa didn't leave me exactly what I wanted, it was still a very good Christmas.

Huggorm...I have seen various cut leaf beeches in my life. You wouldn't think one was an oak. If this is one, it is one that must be named "quercifolia". Enlarge the picture. You can see what looks like Oak leaves coming out! They had the texture of oak leaves, not of beech leaves. But yes I suppose I could have been fooled! It seems like the most logical explanation haha. Although...I just googled Fagus quercifolia...and the pictures that show up, do not resemble this. Maybe this is the true cultivar, and many others are imposters? I saw beautiful southern beeches for much of my trip and will post pictures of them eventually. Yes I didn't even go into the sad state of Christchurch. They are still very much rebuilding 5 years later. They have filled shipping containers with stones and stacked them 4 tall, and 2 deep in parts of the town, to keep collapsing buildings from killing pedestrians. In case their structures cannot hold up anymore, or another earthquake occurs. This allowed them not to have to demolish those buildings while funds for restoration are raised.