First and foremost, I believe it comes down to what you love to surround yourself with. seil is happy with different colors mixed together, and from what I've seen of her garden it works beautifully. She probably has a good eye for color and subconsciously chooses roses that look good together even if not aware of that on a conscious level. Terri likes warm pinks while I adore the cool ones, and Meredith has cleverly combined both by separating them with her entry porch. We each have a different style that works for us. The other consideration is the background in which you plant roses. If you have a smaller garden in the suburbs you can probably do whatever you prefer without worrying about clashing with a larger background. Part of my backyard is a wild, boulder-strewn hill and the surrounding scenery is natural, with hardly a house in view. Most of my less than two acres has been left natural with the garden only on the flat area surrounding the house. For that reason it's very important to me to make the garden blend with the landscape. mendocino rose, with vastly larger amounts of land and a huge number of roses, has chosen a different path by making her rose garden a separate entity, with soft and bright colors mixed together. It works beautifully because she has over 1500 roses which can easily be seen as separate from their hilly background because of the huge impact that large number of roses makes. Fortunately, there's something for everyone, which is what makes looking at others' gardens so fascinating. There are endless ways to incorporate roses into a garden, just as there are endless numbers of gardeners to implement those ways. Ingrid

That really is their common name that almost all people use and also most information shows it as: Alaska cedar Sometimes called: Nootka False Cypress or Yellow-cypress and the best names: Nootka Cypress or Alaska Cypress. It's not correct calling it cedar like above because it's not really a cedar. It really is in the cypress family (Cupressaceae). It really should be called Alaska cypress, but very rarely does anybody call it that. Another example would be the Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) which is in the cypress family (Cupressaceae) and even though it is not a cedar and should not be called that, it is just the accepted common name by almost everybody. Quirkyquercus was not really wrong in a way because the ones that are wrong are the ones that started calling it a cedar many years ago.

Good to know okokkok. I looked at them again and after taking dead leaves off, they look surprisingly good! I've been watching them pretty much all day to see just how much (if any) shade they do get. Well, the shade came just to the back of the plants about 2:30 this afternoon, then receded. I'm thinking of moving them closer to the house and I think they would be shaded for a good part of the day. I've looked all around my front and back yards and cannot see any spot (that's not under trees) that would be more suitable. Wish I'd done more research before I bought them, that's really not like me to jump into something without reading everything I can about it first:( Gaylene

So many people with issues with parents...sad. I was loved, I had toys and gifts,dresses, dolls, books, sport stuff, games,I lacked for nothing . But as I got older, I think I tried to "recapture" my childhood. As an adult, I loved antique shows, flea markets, garage sales. Any time I saw something we had in our house growing up, I had to buy it. I even bought too many rose bushes and planted them in my garden, trying to re-create my Grandma's rose garden. I now have a linen closet stacked with doilies and tablecloths I'll never use, sets of fancy glasses too fragile to use, things like that. Oh, and on the funny side, my daughter cleaned out my bathroom just yesterday. She found eleven bottles of Listerine. I don't know, I hate the stuff, it burns... I remember buying one bottle because it did everything, whitens teeth, freshens breath, makes gums healthy, strengthens the enamel. I'm just always looking for something to make me happy.