Dry rootballs are often the result of textural differences between the soilless potting medium or claylike field soil the plants came from the nursery in and the soil on the new site. If the rest of the bed was moist with the heucheras only being dry then it was something like that - something involving the heucheras specifically - and not the overall conditions. This should have been apparent when these were dug and pulled apart(?) but heucheras specifically are prone to weevil larvae gnawing the roots off and leaving a sort of nearly rootless husk sitting on top of the ground, unable to keep itself turgid without diligent watering - and maybe not even then. The same thing is common here with primroses.

Thanks for the look. I really haven't seen much of Talisman or Picture before. As a side note, I knew someone where I used to work who got Picture confused with another HT named Portrait. We thought it was amusing, but the two are quite different.

Larry, Someone else got 5-lobed bells this year too, maybe it was someone on one of our OK gardening Facebook pages. I'll get an occasional five-lobed bell but not often. It sounds like you were very busy, even as a child. I think you would have made a great doctor because you would have been trying to save your patients, not trying to kill them by supper time (I hope). My best friend contracted polio from the vaccine when we were young children. He survived it and appeared to have mostly recovered, but had a limp forever after. The polio came back when he was in his 40s or early 50s and it killed him. I never knew that could happen---like he wasn't really cured. It stayed hidden in his body for decades and then came back strong. Nancy, I'm already exhausted and we have almost 24 hours more to go. She is more exhausted though. We were running around all day and when we got home about 2 pm, she grabbed her pajamas and told me she was going to go take her bath and get ready for bed---and she was serious. I told her it was not bed time, but swimming pool time, and she woke right up. Now she's fighting to stay awake until after dinner time. Unless she gets a second wind, I think it will be a really early night for her tonight. This week the kids are fascinated with icebox melons. I harvested 13 of them yesterday, ranging in size from about the size of an orange to the size of a cantaloupe and they are in love with the little ones, which I think are the variety Mini Love, and also in love with the fact that there are three colors of flesh---red, yellow and orange. We have tons of icebox melons to eat, and even are sharing them with the fawns and the mothers every evening. We slice and eat melons daily. The nice thing about the icebox sized ones is that they have a pretty long shelf life, so you can cut one or two every day and there's less (if any) left over to put away in the fridge. I don't even put all the melons in the icebox----I just leave them sitting on a counter until we use them. Usually if we cut one or two, we eat all of them that day, or throw out the leftover pieces for the deer. It is so much more convenient than having to cut up a huge one and deal with pieces of it in the fridge for days and days. I didn't do anything in the garden today. I'm just hoping and praying the heavy rain they're saying we will get on Sunday and Monday actually happens. There's been a ton of rain to our south in Texas, particularly in the areas that are in Extreme Drought, so I know that those folks are relieved. The amount of rain they got won't remove the drought, but might knock it back a good deal. The cooler temperatures are very, very nice, so at least we have that, whether the rain comes or not. The garden still looks pretty bad, but when I consider that we're in Severe Drought, I realize it looks about as good as it possibly can considering the weather we are having. Dawn

Thank you! I'm so excited! I repotted the tree, put the pot on bricks to keep it out of the water, treated it with an insecticidal soap that is organic, and cut off any dead limbs. All the leaves were falling off, and there was some sticky substance on a lot of the leaves. I had moved it inside to overwinter it. Now, the tree is a really poor shape because removing the dead limbs made it kind of lopsided, but lots of new leaves are appearing, as well as quite a few little round balls.