Marleah - I also grow all 3 and they are distinct: 1. Crocus Rose is not yellow, it is apricot/buff fading to cream. Like Carrie Jo says, it starts out tight and opens flat, sometimes with a green pointel. It always blooms in clusters. Foliage is small and glossy. Growth upright, never needs staking. 2. Charlotte is medium yellow, very cupped and much more double than Graham Thomas - you never see the stamens on Charlotte. Also, the blooms last much longer on the bush than GT, which in my experience shatter (too) quickly. Growth upright, sometimes long blind shoots which need to be cut back. 3. Teasing Georgia is lighter yellow, fading to cream on the outer petals. Blooms very double and open very flat. Never doesn't need support! Hope this helps! George

Your house is not ugly, but if you feel that way no one here should be invalidating your feelings. I am sure you ARE thankful to have a home. Not liking how the exterior looks has nothing to do with being ungrateful or not feeling blessed to have a home. It simply means that the way it looks is distressing you. You should feel happy every time you pull up in your driveway. Think about what colors make you feel happy, and then find a tone that will accent the brick. Paint or new siding can do amazing things.Shutters in the right color and/or style may look nice, but if you don't like them at all, by all means remove them. Frankly I feel the windows on the back of your house could use some accenting. Maybe not each and every one, but they do look plain which may be part of what is making you feel your home is "ugly". It doesn't have to be shutters either. There should be a way to frame the windows so they look like trim has been put on them....much like we do inside. On a stucco home there are ways to make the windows look trimmed out and painted an accent color. Not sure about the type of siding you have, and whether you can achieve the same effect, but I would think someone could. Landscaping with shrubs, flowers, and trees will transform how your home looks. Done correctly they will bring areas that look out of proportion in scale with the surroundings. Plant trees first and go from there. If you sit outdoors and study your home, your instincts will tell you what you need. Find a friendly nursery and have fun with the process. Just don't plant the trees too close, and choose varieties that will fit the space. There are big trees, and there are smaller trees.

Hi! I have a question about the growth habits of wallflowers. We planted four in our new front bed last year in about May, and they did really well and stayed green over this winter, which was surprising. Before planting we mixed bagged topsoil into our lousy clay soil (house is about 8 years old and it has "new subdividion soil). I also added some slow-release osmocote pellets to the planting holes. Since then we really haven't done anything, except watering when there were long hot dry stretches last summer. The wallflowers are starting to bloom again, but the plant habit has gotten really unattractive to my eyes-- there's a dead area donut (that started at least by winter), though it's more obvious and ugly for some of the wallflowers. See the picture for an example (and for growth context, the original plants were in quart containers and were about the size of the center green section). Is this the typical appearance for these plants, or will it fill in eventually? I love the bright yellow flowers (perfect for our house colors), but the growth habit is so unattractive as to completely ruin the appearance of this plant for me. The creeping phlox toward the front of the bed (on the left of the picture) has a much more attractive growth habit, though it grew less prodigiously. Any advice? Did I do something wrong that I can fix to make these plants grow in more attractively? Thank you very much for your assistance!

Nik, the brush killers are you mention indeed more effective against poison oak (and its evil cousin poison ivy east of the Rocky Mountains) than RoundUp is. My DH Tom is an amateur radio enthusiast and he has a couple of retractable antenna towers in the back part of the property, one in the midst of a bed of roses and the other further back outside the fence behind an old stable. We had that area out in the back cleared of poison oak with a Bobcat (small bulldozer) about ten years ago so he would be able to work there. Now it is just the new sprouts and bird seedings that I must work against. RU works fine for that tender growth, and as Catspa explained, it is less persistent in the environment, which is my reason for choosing it. If I did not work on the poison oak every year it would right back to where it was very quickly. Much of this area is a steep hillside, barely walkable, though it is level where the tower is. This is one of the places I have been planting trees. So far in this area two Quercus douglasi (blue oak), three Pinus sabiniana (ghost pine), a Pinus ponderosa (ponderosa pine), Cupressus arizonica 'Blue Ice' (Arizona cypress 'Blue Ice'), Pinus brutia eldarica (Afghan pine), and a Cedrus deodar (deodar cedar) have survived and even thrived, though a number of my earlier attempts failed. It is brutal out there, and I won't water past the second year. Well, maybe one or two waterings for a couple years longer in a really bad drought year. I think I could squeeze in one or two more trees, and perhaps I will, but I will wait a while. Because of our low rainfall, trees must be spaced well apart so that each has its own area from which to pull water. I'm just grateful that we have enough water to grow trees. I love them as much as I love roses. I don't kid myself that these trees will suppress poison oak altogether even when they are grown because poison oak is quite a shade tolerant plant. However it probably would not get enough light to form a solid six-foot-high thicket like the one that was here before. As for the vast ocean of shoulder-high milk thistles, my thought is that if I can spray enough to keep any from going to seed, we will eventually exhaust the seed bank that has built up in the soil. I hope that is true. We have already switched from discing for fire prevention to mowing, so we aren't stirring up the seeds anymore. And it is less shade tolerant than the poison oak is, so I am hopeful about shade suppression as well. I call my garden 'Hundred Roses' as a play on the name of the town of Thousand Oaks in the southern part of the state. But it has quite recently occurred to me that I could just as easily have called it 'Two Towers' in honor of Tom's antenna towers. Rosefolly