Trying to finish adding a few more of my plants before I go on a road trip next week: Pseudotsuga menziesii 'Hale'. A very small new bright-green dwarf. 'Yahoo'. I love plants like this. I can sneak them into tiny openings in the landscape, surround them with some neat rocks and let them shine for a couple decades. 'Seattle Mountain'. A very nice gold/green doug-fir, moderate grower, lovely plush needles. 'Mucronata'. No info, watching it's health. Name lost. A strong upright blue/green weeper. According to Jim Boyko it's relatively narrow and strongly weeping, similar perhaps to Picea omorika 'Pendula Bruns'. 'Hess' Select'. A very nice blue color. Seems to grow pretty fast, this specimen only gets 4-6 hours of late day sun and seems OK. 'Little Jon'. Tiny little thing. 'Wycoff's Big Blue'. I might have the wrong name, as this plant has been in the ground over two years and still isn't 'Big'. -Will

Thanks Bluespruce, very nice photos with great clarity, so very nice. That plant is actually a Pinus ponderosa and it's called: 'Morris Broom'. Bill Barger has the info now and it's either been corrected already in the ACS Database, or it will when Bill takes the time to fix it. Jerry Morris said it grew as a seedling from a random ponderosa witches broom and that the seedling from the very beginning had a bud mutation and since it has been stable producing only two needles per fascile. Another fella completely disagrees and thinks with certainty that it is almost 100%, Pinus densiflora. The buds have no silver coloration and are not pointed as usual ponderosa, but Jerry says that densiflora could never have pollinated the ponderosa broom where the seed came from. Pinus densiflora he said is not cold-hardy so therefore it is simply not a possibility. Sort of a weirdo plant in other words. Here's a photo of my original plant purchased from Stanley & Sons Nursery as Pinus nigra 'Morris WB' (now: Pinus ponderosa 'Morris Broom') Dax Pinus ponderosa 'Morris Broom' (May Candles).

Timber Teck makes a T&G decking product. TT rial system is nice looking fairley easy to install but very spendy. What I found along with all the bashing...complaints on composite were about the material itself...complaints on South American lumber were mainley about a bad install/finish job. Its very possible to have a T&G ipe project I have several of them out including my own hot tub room floor. East Teak is a full service Mill that is they can machine/dry the lumber any way you want. There are a few little tricks involved with this install but nothing I could not explain if your Contractor is willing to learn and pay attention to detail, of course this is true with any high end decking. JonMon

There are N. American pine species naturalizing in the vicinity of South American pine plantations. If these runaway pines are really and truly crowding out some native plant community, then I agree with those throwing their hands up in the air about this tragedy. But if they're simply colonizing land that long ago was cleared for agriculture, probably holds few to no native plants, etc......what's the harm? I don't expect all to agree with me on this-I also don't think it a great tragedy that a few Scots pines or Norway spruce have naturalized somewhere-but in my hierarchy of things to worry about, it's the obvious bad actors-things like common buckthorn, which really can destroy a woods, that i believe we should be concentrating on. Sometimes you'll read some Wild Ones pamphlet or something where somebody's all up in arms because some tawny orange daylilies are growing in the ditch somewhere. I want to grab them by the collar and shake vigorously. Daylilies in the ditch will not be the end of nature as we know it! At the end of the day, it is novel ecosystems that are being created. They're surely not all good, but they're just as surely not all bad. And this is not a new thing. American Indians, for one example, have been moving plants around for millenia. Why that gets a pass, but not some more recent effort to get something growing where it was not previously I don't know.