I can see for miles at this time of the year. Sometimes, just after a front comes through in summer, the humidity will be low enough to allow a day's glimpse of the Smoky Mountains, but winter here means drier air. We have the delight of seeing snow on the mountains for months before we get it here. And the mountains have such wonderful late afternoon shadows so that some of the foothills stand out when the rest of the time they are just part of the blue. My roses still bloom. And the blooms last and last and last. Some of the chinas are especially gutsy, acting as if they'll bloom up to Christmas. Miss Lowe's single red glows like a ruby and Old Blush may manage to have bloomed ten out of the twelve months of this year. The (not tea) Noisettes continue to chug along with enough blooms to remind me that they really are part China. Safranos are in their third fall bloom cycle; how I wish some of their late fall hips could hold on because the Daddy Pollen that's available now would make intersting offspring. One thing about being on the top of a hill. I don't have leaves to rake. Each cold front that blusters through gives enough winds to move my leaves off the hill top and into the hollows in all four directions. The deer don't come to the top of our hill. They do work the lower gardens and come into the back orchard. But centuries of hunters on this hill top and centuries of accumulated worked stones for working deer hides may have erected "stay away" imprints in all but the densest of deer brains. The predators are out too. Big raptors enjoying the critters that live in the grasses now that the grasses are beaten down by fall rains. The best nursery in town has some huge Camellias in bloom and I am in lust for a camellia that is winter hardy. So now it's time to make a home for a camellia if I can find a spot with the right soil and drainage. Or maybe more than one spot.

LOL Hey, Marlon. [g] I think you have more drive to have new and different than I do. I ripped out everything in my back*yard because it was old, overgrown and were full sun plants that were now in too much shade. So we started over again six years ago, so basically everything was new and different to me since then. Still, I could very easily be searching the catalogs every year for something new and different, except that I've already gotten burned a few times with 'new' plants that failed to live up to expectations. I've grown to distrust the hype of hybridizers. I was dying for some different colored echinaceas and after buying expensive plants two years in a row that didn't survive the winter, I gave up on that. I find things that others find boring, make me quite happy. Like Hollies, that someone mentioned are boring to them. I had a book out of the library by Beth Chatto about woodland gardens and she had some magnificent hollies and very attractive combinations with surrounding shrubs and perennials. Just loved them. I also always wanted to have hollies that I could harvest branches and berries for C*hristmas decorations every year. I was out today looking at the hollies in the yard and I like everything about them. The shiny healthy leaves, The berries just starting to form. The way they respond so well to tip pruning. The dependability and predictability. I feel happy just looking at them. lol The other thought is that some of these plants that get overused and boring get that way for a reason. They are so easy to grow, so dependable to bloom, so healthy and pest free. If you are not always having success with things that you grow, then you try to look for things that will. Successfully growing anything is often exciting in and of itself. :-)

Jessaka, More people "love their fruit trees to death" by overwatering and overfeeding them than kill them by neglecting them. I hardly ever water my yard or trees, and I never fertilize them, because all that does is push them into unnaturally fast growth. I want them to grow at the natural rate that corresponds to the actual rain that falls (or doesn't fall) from the sky. I know that, if all our native trees can survive, grow and produce fruit based on nothing but rainfall (we have lots of native fruit trees in our acres of woodland and semi-woodland), then so can the fruit trees I've planted near the house. That's just my own personal philosophy, though, but it is based on a lifetime of growing fruit trees and observing two things: (1) in rainier years, fruit trees have more insect problems and more disease issues, and (2) in rainier years, the fruit are larger but the flavor is watered down. Also, trees that get more moisture (whether rainfall or irrigation) carry heavier loads of fruit AND foliage, and limb breakage is more common. In a rainier year, it seems like limb breakage (even on properly pruned trees) is much worse than it is in drier years. So, my trees get only rainfall or perhaps an inch or two of rain per month in drought periods when there is no rain at all and they never give me trouble. I read somewhere once that peach and apricot trees grow best in a couple of feet of sandy soil on top of clay. In that type of soil conditions, they have the good drainage provided by the sandy soil and they have good deep soil moisture in the clay beneath the sand. I choose the planting location for our trees based on that....they are in the sandiest soil I have and that band of sandy soil lies on top of thick, red Oklahoma clay, and so far it has worked out really well. It has worked out so well, in fact, that I wish our band of sandier soil were wider so I could plant more fruit trees there. We have some neighbors a couple of miles up the road who have about 6 or 8 fruit trees (judging from their size, they are semi-dwarfs) planted by the previous homeowners. These trees are so far from the house and water faucet, that I don't think you COULD water them, unless you have a couple of hundred feet of water hose, or carry water to them in buckets. They only get natural rainfall, therefore, and have been covered in fruit this year, having somehow survived the late freezes and heavy winds. (They are in a pretty sheltered low-lying area with lots of trees and buildings around.) These are trees that get no special attention and still produce a crop that surprised even me, because the trees weren't looking good at all when I saw them in mid-July, but they had plenty of peaches, including some very yummy white-fleshed ones. So, sometimes I think that the less we interfere with Mother Nature, the better. The first year or two that we lived here, there was a drought and I watered WAY too much, trying to make up for the drought and for the fact that I hadn't improved the soil "enough" yet. (And I KNEW I was watering too much, but was afraid everything would die if I stopped.) I did have greener, lusher foliage but also had every disease and pest issue in the book, so I completely stopped fertilizing and cut the watering back to no more than 1" of water per week, and all the disease and pest issues vanished. So, less water and only natural compost/mulch as fertilizer gives me a less perfect-looking landscape but also less diseases and few pests. I don't know if watering less would solve all the problems you've had with your fruit trees or not, but it did for me. And, of course, you cannot control the amount of rainfall your plants receive. When I lived in Fort Worth, I probably overfertilized and overwatered our landscape too much, but I had lovely, lush St. Augustine grass and I liked keeping it thick and gorgeous. Here, though, I've learned that less is more, and in the times we live in with lots of water rationing, it is probably better to underwater than to overwater. That's just me and my experiences, though, and no one else has to become a "minimalist" at watering just because I prefer it, but it works here for me in our soil and our climate. Dawn

I love walls of emerald green arborvitae, especially their texture, color, and fullness/density. Here is a pic I took about an hour ago at Muirfield golf course(Memorial tournament). Love the wider spacing, this is gonna be a killer wall in 10+ years(road is to left of bike path, need to focus on putt). Looks like they disregarded the internet, which generally suggests 2’-3’ spacing for wall, when deciding on spacing(check out the dead one). If Jack Nicklaus approves Thuja Occidentalis Smaragd as a privacy screen, then they must be good lol. Id say 21, 5-6 footers for 850 is a good deal. Still small enough to “become one with the ground/established” rather quickly. Even the 10+ footer I planted 5 years ago did good, though the smaller the tree, the quicker they get established. I have seen tiny tots outgrow larger trees on more than one occasion. I didnt believe what people were telling me until I witnessed it. All the $5, 1.5-2 foot Smaragd I planted 4-5 years ago are gettin close to 5’, some might be more. In looking at the pic, and knowing that there are lots of deer here, (some of) these may be getting deer pruned, though just a bit. The right two perhaps.