Belated Merry Christmas to all. Especially to Triciae, who was on my mind a lot this holiday and will be during future holidays. Dear Wonder Woman, I hope you are doing well, where ever you are. Thank you for showing me what courage and strength and kindness are. We drove down to the Bay Area for the holidays. Christmas Eve we had dinner with our good friends in Berkeley, raw oysters with mignonette, cracked crab, and the traditional Buche de Noel. Last night we had dinner with other good friends in Richmond, tenderloin, mashed potatoes and a warm cauliflower-brussel sprout salad. I made half of the tenderloin, cut pieces 1" thick and tied them into rounds, pan cooked, with a sauce of reduced white balsamic vinegar, Muscat wine, shallots and garlic, butter, sauteed mushroom stems, blended smooth, then simmered over whole mushroom caps. No recipe, just made it up. Our hostess roasted the rest of the tenderloin with a red wine and shallot reduction. We were supervised by a friend who is a head chef at a large hotel and, for the first time in many years, didn't have to work on Christmas day, but was nonetheless pressed into service which he did with good humour. I've been negotiating a stressful matter at work for the past few weeks. As of Dec 24, we were uncertain whether our little business unit would be shut down and I had prepared myself to be jobless come Jan 1st. That all got resolved satisfactorily at noon on Christmas Eve, final document review pending, so for the first time in a month, I was able to relax and unclench. It was nice.

Carol, I already thought of the smuggling. I could add a lot of cuttings of roses like Evelyn for you to play with, along with the Tones, of course. Yeah, a bargain on the fertilizer. I just don't understand the pricing---if the roses from Canada that we buy here are reasonably priced, why is all the US stuff so high priced in Canada? I know, I'm sure you've asked yourself this question many times..... How is your weather? Ours is just awful for it being nearly April, and I haven't started pruning yet. We have icy breezes that make it so much worse. Meanwhile, I'm still forced to look at a dead, big, toppled over Olivia, still slightly attached to the ground. No, she isn't alive, and she looks awful. But everything else still looks awful, too. The roses are all green but that's as far as they have gone with our weather being so unpredictable. Has the horrid vertigo gone away yet? I am hoping so. I'm also tired of posting old pics and want some new stuff to look at. Have you looked at the spring thread and read what Ben posted about the rose hybridizer and head of roses at the Huntington, Tom Curruth? So interesting, and sometimes Carruth posts incognito on the forum. I hope David Austin, jr doesn't come on this forum in disguise. He might not like what we say about his company. Sleep well, Diane Bernstein-Rose My only not very good photo of the calendula I grew for many years (the neighbors old fence is long gone). I was trying to find this to show Deborah. Now the quail won't let me grow calendula. Frederic Mistral, a rose of complicated centers

That’s a luscious pointsettia! Yes, it is a process to coerce one of these plants to bloom again and not worth it for most. I see that your plant has developed a few small green leaves as has tried to grow past the old brachts. If you had fertilized, there would likely be more new foliage and some defoliation of the red brachts. You can see that chlorophyll is starting to develop on several of the brachts. Please let us know how your plants develop over the upcoming weeks/months. I predict, as the days begin to seriously shorten, that these plants will begin to change. Your indoor lighting may or may not supercede the plant’s natural daylength response. I had the fun experience of growing, with my fellow horticulture students, a couple of big greenhouses filled with poinsettias from small rooted cuttings delivered directly from the producer and breeder, Ecke. It was a long, careful process to grow the plants to commercial quality, and fill up the greenhouses with colorful plants. After that, we started on the florist mums!

So, so pretty and lucky you. I admit to being a little jealous. I've browsed briefly through the website and nothing quite fits into what's left of this months budget 😊 Maybe another time, the leopard pillow is not just speaking to me, it's shouting.... My mother would have loved even just the bag - and I suspect would have looked for ways to try to duplicate the pillow with her skills in fabrics and handwork, a talent I did not inherit.