The dehydrated cow manure is unlikely to do any harm as these products tend to be very low in nutrients. What is more important is the clay soil. Rhododendrons need a highly organic planting medium that drains rapidly and contains a lot of air space. No matter what you do by way of amendments, it's very hard to achieve those objectives with clay soil. The best solution is planting above the clay in a raised bed. I use partially decomposed soft wood bark as the planting medium, other coarse organic mixtures will work equally well. PJM and Aglo are particularly tough varieties. Spindly growth is usually the result of too little light. Prune back to live wood and pinch the growth tips to make them bushier. If they are in too much shade, moving them is the only real solution. A bit of brown near the bud tips sounds normal - the English Roseums should bloom unless they were subjected to extreme cold and wind.

I ordered from Digging Dog for the first time this year. They had a Valentines Sale on the internet, but I screwed up my order, so I had to e-mail, then phone, then phone two more times. When I finally got hold of someone they were very nice and took care of the order so I got the special. Then, they experienced big delays in getting plants from their supplier. This meant my plants were two or more months late getting to me. They gave me opportunities to cancel, but I did not...never thinking that brand new plants going into my soil just as my summer heat comes in is not a good idea. Bottom line, some of the plants died. I don't think it was entirely their fault. I should have cancelled the order. The plants that survived did wonderfully well, and I am wowed with the Rigoletto miscanthus I got from them. It has the purest white variegation I have ever seen on a grass and only gets 4'x4'. I have never seen Nichols Garden Seed and Nursery (Oregon) mentioned on this forum. They have a really great selection of flower, herb, perennial, and vegetable seed, their prices are reasonable and their packets have a generous amount of seed in them. I tried them after reading "The Bountiful Container" a couple years ago. Their seed packets had so much seed in them, that I have pretty well given them my allegiance ever since. I would also give high ratings to Forest Farm, Greer Gardens (the biggest plants I have ever received from any company), Plant Delights, Old House Gardens, Brent and Beckys Bulbs (a few perennials too), High Country, and Lazy S's. All these companies have excellent products and customer service. When I need large amounts of seeds of a kind, I order from Hazzards Greenhouse. They are a wholesale company, but do not have a minimum order requirement. Their seed is of an excellent quality and you can save ALOT of money if you need at least 250 seed of a kind. (With careful storage, I have been able to use one pack of marigolds three years in a row now.) I have also ordered plants from E-bay over the years. Once and only once was I ever dissatisfied. The plants were chrysanthemums, but the wrong variety. By the time I knew that it was too late to complain...

Taking another crack at this, one aspect is that many conifers take what's left after the angiosperms, with their typically-faster growth rate, have taken the better sites. Let me offer just one example, that of Thuja occidentalis up at my land in NE Wisconsin: A part of this land is straight-up swamp, that is, a forested wetland. The "cedar"-the colloquial name for this species,is able to colonize areas having water table essentially within an inch of the surface. I kid you not, when we dig there, the holes immediately fill with water. This coniferous species also grows well on higher, more well-drained sites, but is easily surpassed in growth in such locations by pioneering aspens, birch, maple, etc. So in this one case, the Thuja is taking what's available to it-water-logged soils. Tamarack, another well-known swamp species is exactly the same way. Plant tamarack on an upland site and protect it from encroaching hardwoods, and it will grow very well. but it has essentially no shade tolerance, and left to its own devices would quickly become overtopped by the same hardwood species mentioned earlier. Now do realize, nature is full of niches and diverse situations. What I've described here is just one such item-there are many more. Pyric plant communities are another area where certain conifers, usually pines, can dominate, so long as that fire is not withheld for too long. Think of the great pine woods (whatever is left) of the SE coastal plain of the US. Fires would periodically go through these areas, killing off shrubby species as well as non-fire-adapted tree types, but the pines, with their specialized bark, would survive these fires. The result was the beautiful rather open woods of these areas, replete with saw palmetto understory, etc. If you want to see what happens when man's activities interrupt this process, throwing in some exotic invasive species, look at the demise of the slash pine woods of S. Florida, now with "ladder fuels" allowing fire to climb up into the tops of the pines and thus killing them too. Sad situation, but nobody wants the Walmart to catch fire-well, maybe most don't! In this case, it's man's control of fire, along with the invasion of primarily Malaleuca-an Australian species now virtually extinct in Australia-that is effecting this changeover. Those woods are doomed. There are as many more explanations as there are forest cover types....and that's a lot of types! +oM

Martha As a matter of fact I graduated from MSU in 1975 with B.S. degrees in Entomology and Botany. I live 5 miles from the MSU campus. You are right, they do have many species of evergreens on campus. They even have a Dawn Redwood planted in 1949 from the original 1st lot of seeds brought back from China from the discovery grove. Thus, it is one of the oldest Dawn Redwoods outside of China.