Your description of the azaleas does sound like lace bug - a photo of the rhody leaves would be helpful before venturing a guess there, if your local nurseryman had the leaves to look at and said fungus he may well have known what he was talking about and how to treat. The damage already there won't heal or improve in color (i.e. from the lace bug) but new growth will hide the blemishes and over time those older leaves will be lost. Sorry, no instant fix but rather a slower return to looking healthy.

My seed anxiety is more of a "I haven't checked the Exchange pages in hours. Maybe someone offered a SASBE of their entire seed collection right after I last checked!" But I do also have: "How many seeds should I sow? If I sow them all, I'll have way too many seedlings, and no back-up if they all die. But what if germination is low? What if this packet got heated up? What if these are old seeds? How many should I sow!" I don't feel much anxiety about saving and trading regular flower seeds. I do get anxious about my tomato seeds. If they get mislabeled or there's a stray seed, there's no way to tell! I am so careful when I'm fermenting and packaging them, thinking about the shame if I traded with someone and it was the wrong plant. Someone on the Tomato forum is always telling people they should buy commercial seeds, because seeds from traders are always mixed up. But Bakemom's right--commercial seeds can be messed up too, either not germinating, or the wrong plant. Many people post about commercial seed mix-ups with tomatoes-and almost every traded tomato I've grown was correct. So, save those seeds, and who cares about chaff! However, it is good to look up what the seed looks like; sometimes I get a packet in trade where I do know what the seed looks like, and there aren't very many of those amongst the chaff! Do I hate the trader? Nope! It's just good to look it up if you can.

This is what my tube of Rex-Eme says. Advanced Cream For dry skin conditions, redness from flaking, chapped, chafed skin, and may other irritating skin conditions caused from dryness. User testemonials on file. Incredibly effective yet gentle. You will see the difference overnight in skin tone and texture improvement, as it penetrates and promotes better feeling skin. Indredients Comphor, Emulsifiers,, Eucalyptol, Hydrolized Lanolin, Menthol, Mineral Oil, MineralWax, Petrolatum, Phenol, Propylene Glycol, Purified Water, Resorcinol, Sodium Metabisulfite, Tocopheryl Acetate (Vitamin E). Guess you better not try this, Mallory. But, DD uses it, and her SO's niece had a really nasty patch on the inside of her elbow last summer that they used it on every day of the month she spent with them, and by the time she left, it was practically gone. Tami

Thanks for the reply. First thing I did I checked the ingredients of the recommended mix you used, it mentions spaghnum peat....something that is highly absorbent and water retentive which we don't generally advise using for Adeniums, on this forum anyway. Why the manufacturerers use it in a supposedly fast draining medium I'm not sure. However, it's use can depend on the circumstances it's used in, if for e.g. Plants are indoors and therefore Watering is controlled it 'could' work out ok, if plants are left outside, it may well not as they can potentially stay wet for too long. Adeniums can never have enough inert percentage of material to grow in as they need perfect drainage. What amount of turface did you add % wise? I'm in the UK so use completely different ingredients. Until the plant is uprooted we cant say whether it's soft caudex is from root rot or not. That branch is rotted though. Is it a grafted plant for certain? It could be that it's just callousing that dead arm over by itself and it's getting ready to drop it at that collar that's formed. It doesn't look as if it's salvageable so it may well drop off itself and leave the lower part clear of rot, if it doesn't and it looks brown you will have to get rid of all decay else it will track down the main stem then all could be lost. Pic would help again when you or it decides to remove/drop it. The other two branch ends are also shrivelling, one of mine did the same one year and I cut off about 1cm back to clean white tissue and they healed over with no problems, however, it seems to have longer bits of shrivelling. Leaving the bad ends will only allow it to track further back I'm afraid. As long as there are old leaf scars a plant can resprout from dormant buds and regrow, so in my opinion it's worth trying as you would still have the long portion to try and reshape. Hopefully Rick will come back on this...he knows more than me:-) Gill