Roselee wrote: "...my favorite magical places...belong more to Mother Nature...(because)...it's really all her garden anyway..." My sentiments exactly! I just adore you Roselee. You have that wry sense of humor that I like. You're a strong woman with a lot of spunk, but very caring and loving, and I respect that about you. I enjoy your posts so much. Please come on here and post more often. ~Annie p.s. - I call my place "The Ranch", even though it's just a tad over being 3 acres...and I often say "the back forty", when talking about any part of my yard that is furthest from my back door, least likely to get much attention, and out of hollerin' distance.

I'm a believer in 'Do what works' and garden around all the inconveniences of country life. My garden evolved years before I came along here. Some of the changes were so small, like making the driveway circle around in front of the tractor shed instead of going up a little slope that always washed out in a hard rain. It took months of constructive staring to figure out that simple change, and about half a day to change the drive, fill in the wash and plant centipede grass to stop the erosion. The nice tree line at the north side used to be a pasture fence. When DH was having some bulldozer work done some 20 years, I suggested leaving the young established trees that had come up in the fence row. Now we have three mature pecans, two deciduous oaks, and a live oak. I curved on around toward the back with two shrub islands with crape myrtles and loropetalum with a space in between wide enough for a tractor to glide through. There's a field road on the outside with fruit trees beyond. Everything is planted with an eye toward mowing. Another garden point is the space under nut trees. You can't pick up pecans in a shrub bed, but spring daffodils are gone underground when pecans fall. Thank you for all the nice things you've said about my garden. It's a place for an old lady to play and the dog and cat to roam with the birds and butterflies. Did I tell you all that Buffy treed a raccoon the other day? She also caught a squirrel, whose remains I gave a decent burial with the cat in attendance. Nell

-Christine, great minds must dream alike ;-D -LL, I think you could get some of those vines to grow together really well. I see people who grow Clematis up rose canes all the time- very pretty combo too! And someone I know from the forums has clematis growing up a wisteria tree. I think that would look pretty in your garden. The back yard is where I want the privacy. The front doesn't matter so much- a lot of traffic comes by here so there is not a great deal of privacy anyway. Most of the backyard is enclosed by either a tall vinyl fence or elm hedge (what nasty trees!). The trouble spot is the east side, along a semi-long stretch of chain link fence. It is hard to plant anything along it because there are a lot of tree roots in the area, so you have to find 'pockets' of loose soil to plant in. The solution will likley be to make a loooong trellis, since it would take a lot of little metal ones to make it work. I used to have a Silver Lace Vine in this area. It did a great job at blocking, but it was a rampant thing that wanted to take over all nearby trees. So I got rid of it (pruning weekly to keep it in check is too much!). I plan to put various honeysuckle vines on the trellis- once it is up that is. I already have a sweet smelling Woodbine honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum) there and may some day add Lonicera reticulata 'Kintzley's Ghost', because I like weird looking plants ;-) CMK

Holy moly you guys!!! What an amazing cornucopia of talent we have here! Maybe that's why we're all renovating our kitchens; it's at least half artistic, as opposed to strictly functional. This is such a great thread because it's a way of recognising that each of us has unique talents, and that we should feel good about that! I notice people seem more at ease talking about their anti-talents and being quite self-deprecating about their talents. It's OK to say out loud that you're good at something! cpartist, I saw your drawings up further on the thread, but missed the fact that you drew them! I thought they were photographs of "real" things. WOW!! You are amazing! The flowers are my favourite. Do you sell your art? Where would I get more info on that? I'm asking 100% totally seriously, not just trying to be polite. Do you take special orders? Do/would you frame your art? mushcreek and cpartist, I'm with you on test taking. Between my ability to retain what I read and my skill at test-taking, I'm the perfect student, and that's good because I've been back to college since 2007, with 2 1/2 years to go to get my PhD (2 1/2 years under my belt from the late 70's). It doesn't mean I'm smarter than others; it just means my natural skills align with what universities use to assess knowledge. If I had to do a car repair or paint a portrait or program a computer, I'd be the dumbest person in the room. I'm glad people are starting to realise there are different kinds of intelligences! mushcreek , I'm also an ace speller and perfect at English grammar, and I know the APA 6 handbook like the back of my hand. But I'm hopeless when it comes to crossword puzzles, sudoku, any type of puzzle. I couldn't put together a 100 piece puzzle on my table if you had a gun to my head. I always score exceptionally poorly (under 30th percentile) in any kind of mechanical perception test, like where you see a set of pullies and wheels and you have to figure out where the chain ends, or where you see a piece of paper with dotted lines on it and you have to figure out how to fold it to make the origami object they show you. I'm terrible at visualising anything 3D, which is why it's weird that I can picture interior designs for a room with perfect clarity. But I can't draw anything, especially not floor plans, which is a big reason I decided against going to college for interior design. I would have to draw, draw floor plans by hand and on the computer. I would flunk out, even if I had the best rooms! Even on these forums, when posters put their floor plan here, it is extremely difficult for me to visualise it. If they post photos of the room, I can see it instantly and know exactly what should be done. :-) Funkycamper, I'm glad you keep reading this thread! It's funny how we see things in others as talents, but see things in ourselves as just natural things that anyone could do. Believe me, your gifts in recalling numbers, finding things geographically, test taking, spelling, and multitasking (which mushcreek also has) are TALENTS!! I know they just seem natural to you, but I guarantee people would give anything to acquire those talents. I recently read an article that said multitasking isn't really a thing, except in rare circumstances. People say, especially in job interviews, that they can multitask, but usually the human brain doesn't operate that way, and people actually end up taking longer when they try to accomplish several things at once, as opposed to doing them one at a time. The article said, and I've read this before, that when people are interrupted by the phone, or in person, that it takes 15 minutes to get focus back on what they were doing. SO... what you and mushcreek have described is a rare gift!!! The article mentioned that there are people, like you, who can truly multitask. So stand up and be counted as having an amazing talent!! :-) I'm not a great multitasker; I am easily distracted--shiny!--but I am great at doing things in my head. I almost always write my papers in my head before I write a single word on my computer, and most of my papers are 20-35 pages long. I've got some good sized chunks of my dissertation in my head right now. I can also do grocery lists, lists of errands, and stuff like that in my head. My DS has the same thing. Before he went to MIT, he got a Bachelor of Music in classical piano performance. I used to see him lying on the sofa with headphones on, eyes closed, and fingers wiggling in the air. If I asked him what he was doing, he'd say practicing piano. He'd have the entire work committed to memory before he ever set fingers to the ivory. Funkycamper, may I ask the origin of your screen name? Also, your geographic memory is awesome, and I'd give anything for that talent! I bought my house in October, and before that stayed there as a houseguest of the owners, one of my best friends and her husband, for the entire month of September. I'm not moving in until June, but have occasion to go out there fairly often. I cannot find my own house without GPS, and sometimes even with it! :-) Whenever someone uses the phrase "jack of all trades, but master of none," it reminds me of an old joke in academia. As you progress through college, you become more and more narrowly focused. Your doctoral dissertation will be on something very specific. So the joke is the more education you get, you know more and more about less and less, until finally you know everything about nothing. Haha! Jillius, I LOVE the idea of "one and a half attention spans!" Brilliant! That would make an excellent study. Keeping your hands busy with physical activity you can do mindlessly with muscle memory that enables you to focus on the lecture, sermon, your spouse's long story about their day, whatever...that's a great concept! I'm a note taker too. My ex and I used to go to a lot of baseball games. I LOVE baseball! But I would get so distracted by everything else that goes on in a stadium that I'd miss important stuff like home runs, lol. I finally found the thing that allowed me to concentrate on the game: filling in the score card you always get with the program. It was a steep learning curve for me to learn all the symbols of official scoring, but it kept me super focused on the game because I couldn't miss one pitch. :-) I also put a headphone jack in one ear and listened to the live radio broadcast! My ex thought I was nuts and my friends thought it was funny, but it worked for me! I've so very much enjoyed this conversation and I hope everyone will join in as we celebrate our talents and empathise with our anti-talents! This is fun!