Lovely Pat. I just love your arbor. Too bad about Hakuree. Mine is in bloom today as well and all blooms have a slight jasminey fragrance. Don't give up yet as it might just be a maturity thing and it will develop it. Also remember that some plants have fragrance at a specific time of the day to attract pollinators. Early morning or late evening tend to be the time of day that most plants that have "fragrance periods" tend to bloom. Don't you just love heptacodiums? I like the fact that the blooms are late in the season when little else fragrant can be in bloom. Unless you cut those trunks back on a yearly basis and train the tree as a shrub, you are going to have little luck getting Arabella to climb/scramble through it unless you tie the vines of it onto the trunks.

LOL. Yes that's Fred the Hose Sr.... Fred Jr, holds court over the back yard.... Jr. is just as much of a picture hog as his father. Thanks for the compliments.

Having grown up with paper wasps, I see them somewhat differently. While they leave me alone in the garden, if their nest gets bumped (like in a canoe), they will defend it vigorously, and their stings are really painful. I don't think of them as non-aggressive, but rather as being very aggressive if you give them cause, and willing to leave you alone if you don't. Now mud daubers or dirt daubers have always seemed to me to be much more passive. I've been stung many times over the years by paper wasps, mostly as a child, but never by a mud dauber, even when I was knocking down their nests from doorways, etc. But worst of all are hornets. Oh, my. You do NOT want to bump into a hornet's nest (the ones that look like big paper footballs). Hornets and yellow jackets seem to me to be far more aggressive than the other wasps I'm familiar with. Eeeek. Right after we moved into this house, we had yellow jackets suddenly appearing all over the INSIDE of our windows. We were told they probably had a nest inside the walls and that it could be huge. But they started dying on their own shortly thereafter, and never came back. I was sweeping up piles of yellow jacket bodies for weeks. We were lucky that they expired on their own, I reckon. Might have been a very different story if they had hung around long. Marcia

DV - Thanks. :) They'll be a constant nightmare (on the "way back there" garden area) as I cheaped out and used fence pickets for the decking. But when money's tight, you do what ya' gotta' do. ;) Big - It's a "floating" deck. Framed in 2x6 (since it was ours, went overboard and did 16" OC). Sits on a ton (not literally, but it felt like it after moving/leveling them) of those deck-blox piers. It will be around (and perfectly level!) long after I'm gone. :) The walkways... well, they're not as imppotant as the deck, and I'm okay with replacing them from time to time. ;) It was fun and very satisfying tying two of my hobbies (gardening / carpentry) together to make something we all can enjoy. :) -John