Usually pinching off the flower buds will encourage more green growth.

Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I don't get to share my gardens with too many people because I'm at the end of a road that no one comes up and most of my friends are not into gardening in the least. My DH and I really enjoy our yard, especially in autumn. Such a bittersweet season.

Get thee hence to amazon.com and buy some Sunset gardening books! They have excellent advice for the Western gardener, none better. Also, many of their smaller specialty paperbacks show up on the 'sale' shelves at drugstores, Wal-Mart, Costco, etc., which are great buys. I picked up their latest 'Trellises & Arbors' book for $4.95 at Long's, a few feet away they were still selling their remaining copies at $12.95! It is hot and dry where you are, but can get nippy at night in winter although frost is very rare. You're in Sunset zone 21 so there are wonderful tropicals available to you. The biggest thing for you to be aware of is that your soil heats up fast and stays warm throughout most of the year. Stay away from cool-soil plants (or keep them in the shade) and you'll be fine. Many of the nurseries are carrying Australian and South African plants now as their climate is similar to ours. You are right to get into foliage, you can have a beautiful garden year-round in CA if you use the right plants. I'm 400 miles north of you so some of what I grow won't work for you, but some will: Clumping evergreen daylilies Lantana of any kind, trailing or shrub Agapanthus, and there are beautiful variegated ones now Abutilons (partial shade where you are) Pelargoniums, the fancy leaf hybrids Osteopermums will flower year-round for you, in fact they will flower themselves to death! Coleonema Bearded iris stay evergreen and many flower twice a year in partial shade Lavendars, rosemaries, euryops, argyranthemums all have lovely foliage Tibouchinas, melianthus, grevilleas will all love your weather. At their feet: gazanias, helianthemum, asteriscus maritimus ('Gold Coin'), lambs ear, alyssum. And I won't even get started on vines--oh, do you have great choices open to you....

msrose Unfortunately My DH has requested I not put photos of our home on the internet. B4 Coloredthumb passed she had put some of hers on-line, I have the pass words to her old accounts I may be able to find some and post them but it takes me a while. The technique is layering several very thin coats of plaster onto a wall then burnishing all of the plaster and finally sealing with a paste type wax. It does look very old world. It has depth and dimension and looks more like old granite than plaster. You get the plaster colored to what you want because painting after to give it the same look is many more steps. There were quite enough steps in just the plastering for me. the name brand already colored plaster is expensive but the larger bucket of cheaper plaster and color it yourself is not that bad and works just as well. Both the brand type and the self mix dries darker than it is wet. Sanding the wall to give the plaster something to stick to is the first of many steps up and down, up and down, up and down the ladder and around and around and around the room. I most definitely agree with forboystoo Venetian plaster is a lot of work and my arms, shoulders and back ached a lot. It is not for the faint of heart or those with a low pain threshold. It looks much easier on the home decor/improvement shows because they have an entire crew doing most of the work. Doing a 6' X 8' bathroom took me 6 days and every day was long and painful. On the seventh day I wept and rested because I couldn't move anymore. I used the tissue paper in a breakfast room at a friends home. We wanted to make it light and airy with the look of forest greenery in the distance. It depends on how much of the scrunching is still showing after the paint dries to how the final look comes out. Our first attempt/tryout did look like green suede leather. We just made more smaller scrunchies in the tissue and finally got the look we wanted. I've never been able to achieve a granite or rock look with the tissue, but there have been some awesome things we have done tissue wise. Lil