FWIW the old one at Longwood Gardens has died. According to their database, they are trying other younger ones accessioned starting in 2012. Unfortunately they are prone to severely damaging foliar diseases in hot, humid climates...not just root rots! I have a normally finicky Rhododendron 'Nancy Evans' that is growing like a champ in these clammy parts - growing just fine because it's grafted onto a super rot resistant hyperythrum hybrid. The foliage always looks flawless. Although it's fascinating that there's a recent report of grafting Sequoia onto Metasequoia, I can't think that grafting Sequoiadendron onto Metasequoia would make a damn bit of difference in the eastern US. Summers are either going to be pleasant enough (e.g., lower dewpoints) that they don't suffer from Cercospora, or they aren't!

Moc, I have a section in my vegetable garden that has close to two feet of sandy loam that I just trench out in the Fall and bury my pots about an inch below the surface. After a good hard freeze, I put almost a foot of leaves on top of them and ignore them until about mid-April. Of course, the pots are filthy when I remove them, but I have three weeks or so to get them cleaned up to spread around the in ground hostas. I think the key is to avoid the freeze - thaw cycle as much as possible. (So far, I did loose one in ground hosta - a Lucy Vitol, but it was on a decline and I took a start of it and that's coming up in its pot just fine.)

When I was six years old and living in Southeast Missouri, I had no idea what I was doing as I cut off 4 inchea of a small branch of a beautiful, early spring, blooming rose bush. The soil there was a well-draining, sandy loam, and I simply stuck it into the ground near the basement wall of our house. The area seemed to get a nice cooling dappled shade from mature trees around and from being so close to what I think was the east wall of our stone; tall enough to be three or four story, but only two story house. The conditions there must have been perfect to root a rose cutting that early spring. With no training or experience seeing it done previously, I simply put one of my mother's quart sized wide-mouth canning jars over it; kept it watered, and experienced a satisfied, amazement to see that it had rooted and seemed to begin growing in only about 2 weeks or so. Up till then, I had only seen my parents grow a myriad of vegetables and flowers. The fruit trees and vines were already mature and had been planted prior to my birth, so I am not sure if they planted them from seed or not. Well, seeing that little stick, which I stuck in the ground, root; excited me, and I wanted to see it happen again. That was the end of my experiment, though, because by then the temperatures had risen just enough that the next one I tried, it did not root; rather, it simply steamed in the jar. I had fairly quickly transplanted the first stem that had rooted, and it grew to be nice rose bush, but since there was such an abundance of gardens and flowers around, I quickly lost interest in that rose bush. The experience taught me that starting new plants from cuttings can sometimes happen with little or no effort in the right conditions, but if one is not well rounded in the knowledge how to successfully take a plant from cutting to new, thriving plant status, then many such efforts can surely, more often then not, lead to futility; instead of that feeling of excited joy I felt from my first successful rooting. I still consider it amazing that at age 6, I hit upon the right timing and conditions for simply sticking it in some every day foundation soil and covering it with a mason jar, while keeping it watered, and it turned out that such simple efforts were all that was needed from me.

Madonna, I have about 12 Brachychiton rupestris planted down my driveway, they have taken about 8 years to develop nice looking bottle bases. I have higher rainfall than they are use to, about 1800mm compared with about 500-1000mm, but they do fine if given well drained soil. They however hate being shaded out with a large leaves tropical rainforest plant- in this case I have about 3 which have started to rot because they are too shady and wet. They would grow quite fine in your situation-however in the full sun they grow rather squat ~8m max. They can handle frost and full sun once established, just water it in every couple of weeks for 6 months and it will charge. From Kris