Dear Tom, I am so very sorry for your loss. I too am in zone 6, though not sure if I'm 6b or 6a. From your description of your climate, it sounds pretty similar to mine, except we do often get much hotter than 90. And of course last winter was unusually cold (strings of below zero days). In any event, I often buy bands around this time (usually as my birthday present to self) - and in fact I have 2 replacements of incorrect roses coming from Rogue this week. I have never lost a one over the winter. Here's my technique: Unless the plant arrives REALLY huge, I never plant a band directly in the garden - I find the little bands just get swamped by bigger plants. Instead, I give the band a few days to recover from shipping. Then, I get a 1-gallon pot, fill it with a good organic (no chemical fertilizer) potting mix, and plant the band in said pot. I use a trick I learned from Northland Rosarium, which is to put the band, pot and all, in the big gallon pot, then fill in with the soil, then pat down. Now, slip the band pot out - you'll have a perfectly band-shaped hole in the pot. Then, gently slip the rose out of its pot, and pop it into the perfectly-sized hole, and fill in and firm in with soil. This minimizes root disturbance and shock to the little rose. In its gallon pot, the rose can grow on through the rest of the summer, putting on roots and size. You just have to be careful to keep it watered and fertilized (I give it a handful of slow release organic stuff like Alfalfa meal or Rose tone about a week after potting, and that's it for the summer. No chemicals its first year!) Now, to get it through the cold winter! Come fall, usually close to around when we get first frost, I clean out my veggie garden. Then, I dig a hole, and sink the potted-up rose in. I sink it in so the entire pot is underground, up to its lip, but the plant is sticking out. Then, once the cold really starts to set in, I put a blanket of leaves over the plant. Its ok to let the top of the plant stick out, but I like to cover the bottom few inches with leaves, just in case we have super-cold. I have been using this technique for many years, and have yet to loose a rose. The only worry is if you have voles or mice who might get under the leaf cover - in which case you might want to add some kind of repellent like shavings of stinky soap, etc. I brought all my last-year's birthday roses through our brutally cold past winter, so I feel like this technique is pretty reliable! In the spring, you can dig out the plant, maybe let it grow on a bit more, and then plant it out in late May or early June. All best wishes, Frances

I work at a greenhouse where pelargoniums are one of my bosses favorite plants. We have, at last count, 75 different 'flavors' of scented geraniums. We also have about the same amount of fancy leafed and specialty geraniums, dwarfs, stellars, rosebuds, cactus flowering etc. The only bad thing is so far we have not been able to get a mail order business going yet. Although, I'm sure if anyone was interested, it wouldn't be a problem to work out shipping. We have tried a couple of times to get a website going, but so far it hasn't happened. If any of you are interested, I could try to get a list of what we carry, and post it. I know that it is frowned upon to advertise in the forums, so I haven't posted about it in the past. Maybe if enough of you would be interested it would be an incentive to get that website up and moving! I didn't have a chance to check out the other links, so I don't know how we compare to some of the other nurseries in selection. I know that I do most of the propagation, and it sure seems like we have a big selection to me! :)

Bob Villa shows an interesting approach to creating a dry basement space in a parged rubble foundation basement. (See Link below.) First, the contractor put in a shallow interior perimeter drain leading to a sump. Then he covered the walls in a vapour barrier called Cleanspace, which is dimpled to the wall side. This still allows vapour and water moving from outside to inside. But it is channelled to the drains and away. This system seems logical. But, as my previous post shows, you have to be very careful when you excavate inside. An old home may have very narrow footings, or even none at all. On one old home I renoed, the previous owner had lowered the basement floors below the footings. The footings were simply bricks set perpendicular to the wall and were so loose you could pull them out by hand. (In that case, I built an engineered retaining wall around the entire inside perimeter.) And I have also seen warnings that below slab interior perimeter drains can end up removing the soil from underneath the footings, thus undermining the structure. An outside approach to waterproofing is illustrated in George Nash's Renovating Old Houses, where he suggests excavating, then sistering a new wall onto the foundation. (This presumes the rubble wall doesn't fall down in the proces first!) Here is a link that might be useful: Basement Waterproofing

Hmmm. Not a one anywhere near here that I've seen in over 40 years, and no arboretum either. The only local nursery carries quite large and expensive woodies only--nothing small, and nothing unusual. So disappointing. I do have Golden Spirit--is that quite the correct name?--it was an ungainly plant left to itself and I began coppicing it a couple of years ago--MUCH more attractive. And while the purple leafed ones are quite striking, they too do best here if they are coppiced. But I know how hardy the species is, and the blue/green leaves are quite attractive. And it's just the size I need.