I spotted the first spring crocus bud today. They have been coming into flower in the second or third week of January in recent years, but maybe this one is just a freak. No sign of snowdrops yet, the first usually flower about a week after the first crocus. I don't have any of the autumn (pre-christmas) snowdrops but I keep meaning to get some. Very cold here at the moment but daffodils, tulips, daylilies, and dutch iris all have growth above ground ready for spring.

All-righty; Here are photos of the CPK plants for ID purposes: KMOTGG: and (by the way, I just figured out that ripe seed is falling off, hidden inside fresh pink petal-like things! Grab a bowl and "tickle" the seeds off into it) Curly willow: Maximilian sunflower (perennial) and And the mystery thing: Mone, please tell me what this is! Motria, if I had much in the way of red perennials, I'd be happy to trade with you. But I don't! If everything that I think is a Maltese Cross seedling actually is, maybe we can trade some of those in the spring. If we get together again this year, I can give you some seeds for a nice dark-pink annual, Silene armeria. Susan, what do you do at the seed bank? Where in the gardens is it? We had a great time there on Labor Day--we biked in, kept dipping our sandaled feet into fountians to keep cool, then biked to Ravinia for their 1812 Overture (with cannons!) I hope you had fun in Michigan. I'd love to see your photos. Ellen, I wonder where all those hostas are going? Your yard was pretty full in May! I am almost done fencing off my new hosta garden and I've dug out some of the beds for them. I'm excited because the Fragrant Hybrid I bought at Dominick's this spring has one fertilized seed pod on it! Hopefully the babies will smell as wonderful. That garden thingy sounds neat, but Woodstock is so, so far from me and even Scott! I hope some of you guys do go together and have fun.

lsimms, I've posted some pictures of the garden I help out in over the years. This is my friend's garden and I'm sure you can appreciate that I can't be posting pictures of her garden. I have posted pictures over the years, but the pictures are always isolated pictures of the plants themselves, all with the thought to respect her privacy. She has no problem with any of this, and her garden has been featured many times in some of the gardening magazines. Her work is well known. If you're ever near the North Western part of Connecticut, let me know. (Do I have any pictures? I've gotten very interested in photography recently and I've got literally thousands of pictures of the garden.) Roseberri, Blue Billow, for me, in zone 5/6 has never failed to bloom profusely for me. Never. I've been working with some for as long as 20 years and they always bloom. I know they've done the same for a couple of friends in slightly colder zones. Like a real 5. I haven't had the same luck with any of the few other Hydrangeas I've tried to leave out. I don't know that I've put Blue Wave to a good test, so I can't be 100% sure about saying that it probably wouldn't work for me. I'm surprised that you're not seeing blooms from Blue Billow. I'm another person who has not had any luck with Endless Summer. I can't figure it out. I bought some of the very, very first ones, and some over the years from all sorts of sources, so I really doubt that I've only gotten mislabeled plants. I think, for whatever reasons, I am right on the edge of the zones that will allow Endless Summer to work. Right on the edge of the zone that will allow almost any of the Hydrangeas to really work. Egoct lives just down south of me and quite clearly has all sorts of Hydrangeas that do quite well for him. I've seen it in other instances. Less than an hour away, as far as Hydrangeas blooming, the difference is like night and day. It's not a matter of degree. Go one hour South and you get great blooming. But where I am, it's zilch. I think that may also be a reason that lsimms gets great flowering. Her garden, I think, is perhaps closer in climate to egoct's than mine. It's a small difference from mine, just like egoct's, but in the world of these Hydrangeas that seems, to my eye, to make a world of difference. For me the plant will mostly get killed back to the ground each year. But sometimes I get lucky and the plant is not entirely killed back and I'll get some blooming. Again, just on the edge of its hardiness in that regard and just enough on the edge that, for most years, I get very little of that initial bloom from the "old" wood. I was just scanning one of the threads about Endless Summer being a bust and it seems to me that the ones posting great success were, from what I could see, all posting from zone 7 or higher. Zone 6 is iffy, and zone 5 is a bust. My plants almost always die back to the ground each winter and you might think that with an Endless Summer, one that is supposed to bloom on new wood, that wouldn't matter, that there would be plenty of time to develop a flower, but it just doesn't work out. Someone used to post here from someplace like Mississippi and would show these great pictures of a reblooming Endless Summer. Wow!!! There is definitely something different about the plant in that environment. She posted pictures and you'd see all these flower buds developing along leaf axils of the new growth. I can't get even a terminal flower blooming and she's posting pictures in which after the terminal flower blooms and she deadheaded it, the remaining stem sends out buds all over the place. I have a suspicion that the sun plays an important role in all this, but I don't know exactly how. None of mine are in serious full sun and I wonder about that. Right now, I get more sunlight hours than someone in Mississippi. Could that be a factor? (It'd be interesting to me to know what these plants would do in a place like Juneau, Alaska that is getting close to 18 hours of sunlight a day right now. Would more sunlight hours mean better or worse flowering for ES? I'll let you know if I figure it all out. I've rambled a bit in this post. Hope it all makes some sense. Hay

I have so much trouble growing nice carrots in this rocky soil . . . I better check what came out as fairly nice "baby carrots" in 2013 before jumping at an "improved Sweet Baby Jane type" and where has she been all my life? How do you suppose veggie varieties get their names? Beans: Bronco, Pony Express, Hickok, Frontier - they've got a new one, Oakley. Shootinist, hootinist, tootinist . ! . . no wait, we are talking beans . . . Cabbage! Yeah, lots of new cabbage this year. Oriental veggies . . . which Stokes lists alphabetically in the "c's" so you know they are thinking "Chinese." Funny, there's actually a link between the old Stokes and a Japanese seed company (Sakata, was it?), I read in a history of the company. You'd think they'd pay more attention to Asia these days . . . hmm . . . always the new sweet corn . . . Stokes worried me a few years ago by having so few new "anything." I guess that was the recession. . . got a new Beit Alpha cucumber and it doesn't seem to be a hybrid. Good that they've got one - I wonder if it can take cool springs. Rockstar cantaloupe, well we all want to be a rockstar. Goosebumps pumpkins. Lunch Lady!! Ornamental gourds - warted! Well, how rude! Skipping over the accessories for now . . . Indigo Rose "cocktail size" tomato. Black tops to rose red . . . hmmm. For the folks who can grow impatiens, Stokes always has a nice selection! You'd think they'd do well here but the hot, dry weather hits just about the time they want to bloom and you've got shriveled flowers the rest of the year . . . Jade sunflowers. I wonder if that is too much like the whites and doesn't hold its petals well. Sure doesn't look jade green to me but it is kind of green. Oh look at those pansies!! Yeah, this is petunia country. Should start them again in the greenhouse. They've got a new grandiflora, Limbo. Can't decide if I want petunia bedding plants, kind of in as state of . . . maybe I'll give that some more thought! Got that new shed-attached tunnel! Some of those shorter snaps . . . dwarf delphiniums? Oops, I must have missed the salvia . . . Where did I get those big salvia in 2012? Steve's digits