In my area narrow-leaved versions of cordyline and dracanaea are often described and sold as "spike plants" to use as the center plant in a container of summer annuals. I've seen them with labels that just say "Annual Spike" with no botanical name. Both look like grass, but are actually trees that eventually develop woody trunks. They can live many years with the right care. If you think you have a cordyline, then try a web image search for that name. See if the photos match your plant. Mine came tagged with the proper name so there was no mystery. Pruning may induce branching. I have never pruned mine. For now, I like the symmetry of the single stem with its fountain of deep red leaves.

Peas are a cool weather crop. They are meant to grow in the cool spring weather and warm weather has a negative effect on them. The benefit of that is that you harvest your crop of peas, pull the peas out and now have room to grow something else over the summer, like string beans that like the heat. Or any other heat loving crop. Then in the fall you can grow peas again into the cool fall weather. Unfortunately, climate challenges can make the cool weather crops iffy. I found this year it was too cold to plant peas in the end of March as I usually would, from seed. And I started them late after mid April and now they have not even begun to produce peas and I'm wondering how four straight days of over 90 degree weather is effecting them. I may not get a crop at all. I am keeping mine well watered and try to provide some shade during the hottest part of the day when it is this hot and keeping my fingers crossed. The same problem may present in the Fall. If it does not get cool soon enough. It seems like there is Winter and there is Summer nowadays and Fall and Spring are iffy in the vegetable garden.

Lilyfinch I'm west of Franklin so I don't think I'm very far from you. I'm somewhat new to this as well but I'm happy to share what I've figured out. Number one is that I avoid having roses in pots at all costs! Last year I bought bands in the spring and nursed them along all summer in pots, potting them up a couple times as they grew. I got the plants in the ground in Sept a little after the heat broke. With bitter, bitter cold hitting very early for us--early November--and returning multiple times over the winter I lost about half the roses that I got planted in the fall. I just don't think they were given enough time to establish themselves before the weather turned. This year when I got bands I potted them up to gallons and after about 6 weeks of growth put them in prepared beds. (Some in a permanent place and some in my vegetable garden for transfer later.) These planted roses are doing SO MUCH better than the bands from last year stuck in pots. More growth, less disease and tens time easier to keep watered and cared for! I've seen a real correlation between roses getting short changed on water from being in a pot (and depending on me to water daily and sometimes twice a day--a chore that I sometimes missed) and those same roses getting black spot. I have a climbing pinkie I don't spray. Just in the last couple of weeks for some reason the black spot pressure has seemed to spike a bit. It is normally clean. At the moment it has a few lower leaves that have spotted and turned yellow, but in general it doesn't seem to have a significant amount of defoliation. This plant was a gift from a friend who had it limping along in a pot for a couple years. When I put it in the ground and threw a shovel of horse manure on it and kept it reasonably well water it exploded in growth and made a 180 turn around in health. I also have a Mrs. Dudley. Last year's band was a casualty of winter and was replaced by a 3 gallon plant this spring. It is growing but slowly. I also pinch most (not all) buds hoping to focus energy on growth not blooming. In general my teas are clean of black spot with only a few old yellow leaves toward the bottom of the plant. The cleanest are Mrs. B R Cant, Madame Antoine Mari, Duchess du Brabant, Mons Tillier and Mrs. Dudley. I wouldn't tried to do pots here again without some sort of automatic watering set up because you miss a few waterings and the roses get diseased and start loosing their leaves in a heart beat.

My shasta daisies, columbine, daylilies, iris, lilies, sedums, mock orange, forsythia, crepe myrtles, beauty bush and sunflowers bloomed nicely. Out of about 10 cannas I only had 3 to bloom and two of them only put on one bloom session. I was really hoping to get a good showing from them this year. Speaking of deer, they eat the tops off my lilies, every cone flower I have ever planted and my salvias. The rabbits eat all the leaves off the daylilies for awhile but when the grass grows better they stop so the d/l still bloom. I do think it slows down their multiplying though. Ya'll's pics are lovely! I grow dianthus firewitch, siberian blues and several others without names. They've come back for about 5 years now and I don't think the unknowns are supposed to be perennials. ;-) Nancy