Muscovyduckling, She is quite thorny, but not horrifically. And not those dastardly hooked ones that Marcheal Neil has. I am amazed at the very dark green of the foliage. One reference said 20 feet and I have just the spot. Jackie, I don't mind the yellow. I only expect it to appear in our mild fall/winter. Looks like she will be very changeable which is what I hope for. Ingrid, good to hear that it may be a steamy noisette and to have the possible agreement of jaspermplants. Catspa, the flowers are small now. So it is good to hear that they may get larger. That was her only, very forgivable fault, in my eyes. Wonderful pic that shows her creamy nature. O Susan, that pic is perfect. Where did you find her on fort? This winter is the season I graft! I love this rose so much already, she may have moved to the top of my grafting experiment list. Yes, Jeri, it IS wonderful. Veronica

"And I have newfound hope for the garden." Sherry, that says it all. Your post perfectly expresses my own thoughts about gardening and sums up what it can teach us: that we must both struggle and adapt; that life is change; that while there is always loss there is always also renewal; that living organisms struggle mightily to survive, and succeed more often than we might have expected. You've been through hard and frightening times lately, and I wonder if your experiences in gardening turned out to have any meaning when you were so worried about your husband? Applying lessons in philosophy to life is terribly difficult. I don't know whether I would be able to do so, but I do know that, in the garden at least, I've learned to accept the idea of change. Plants grow, and crowd other plants; a tree blows over, and sun bakes a part of the garden it never reached before; I mulch and mulch, the grass grows for years, the earth becomes softer and earthworms arrive; cane girdler shows up and devastates the roses; a wet winter comes and provokes a major slide; I plan a romantic ravine on the site of said slide. And so on and on. Gardening is life, really. I hope I'll never reach the point where I don't want to grow things any more, because I fear it would mean I had spiritually died. About all the plants I talk about that you don't know. North and Central Florida have a soil and climate that don't have many equivalents in other parts of the world, at least, not ones well published in the annals of horticulture. Florida's too hot and humid for many temperate climate plants; too wet in summer for those adapted to Mediterranean conditions; too cold, with its occasional sharp freezes, for tropicals. So the plants belonging to the great gardening traditions of continental Europe, of Great Britain, and of the Mediterranean basin, of the various tropical zones of the world, much of the time don't work. There are nurserymen (and -women), horticulturalists, and gardeners who do a lot of research looking for plants adapted to Florida conditions, and find them, but the plants aren't handed to them on a plate. My sisters' coastal north Florida gardens, with their gingers, cycads, hardy citrus, huge agaves, Sabal palms and live oaks and hickories, contain hardly a plant I could grow here. But their gardens are beautiful. Congratulations on your getting back to your garden, and on finding out that it was still there! And on having a daughter-in-law who helps you. I live next door to dairy farmers. In my experience they rely on lots of big machines, government price supports and subsidies, a reasonable amount of technical expertise, and a great deal of steady, ongoing, hard physical labor. Lavender Lass, I wholeheartedly agree. I wish I could find words to express my delight in gardening in cooperation with Nature, my intelligence spreading its wings as I attempt to read and understand the conditions of my land. Gean, the Hugelkultur sounds interesting--I'd never heard of it--but my heart faints within me at the thought of digging out an entire bed to fill the bottom of it with rotting wood, even if we had much of that material. We don't have anything like enough decomposing organic matter available. We amend our propagating beds with bagged coarse sand and bagged compost, since we NEVER have enough organic matter from our own supplies. As the previous year's crop of plants matures we dig them out and plant them, and then we add the amendments to the beds, dig them in, and start the new cuttings. Last year I left the digging to my husband and suspect he didn't dig deep and thoroughly enough. The exceptionally wet winter may also have made a difference. This year's yield was terrible. I always amend my planting holes abundantly with old hay. Sometimes I have to dig and amend a hole two years running before it can support a rose. You're right that I have a garden: and thanks for saying so in the face of my sometime expressions of discouragement. However, I do wonder if you realize how dead my sunny garden looks in August, with no trees, hardly any large shrubs, after it hasn't rained nor been watered for two months, the sun blazing down the entire time, and nothing growing but the weeds. I don't know how many people dry garden in a dry summer climate as I do (though, unlike much of California, we do have good average annual rainfall). I believe the garden will look far more prosperous in summer once our many infant and young trees and shrubs start to get some size on them. Shade and leafage are precious allies. Jeannie, thanks for saying so. I care about my writing; and I love it when others respond. That's beautiful. Kitty, I want to answer your post but must put it off. My assistant is coming to help in the garden and I need to change. It's supposed to start raining this afternoon; I believe fall, as in gloom and chill, has finally come. The garden has greened up amazingly in the last month and has been a pleasure to see and work in. Melissa

So if we were to do a 1.5 story with the master on the main level, where would you put that, behind the garage then? My thought process would be to first determine priority of room placement in the most ideal location for the use of the room and then if conflicts between room placement develop then rank by how much time is spent and how time is used for each room as well as the importance of that use compared to the importance of the uses for the other rooms. If watching the sunrise from your bed pays off with more enjoyment than having the sunrise and morning sun striking your kitchen, then plan accordingly. For instance, do you plan on using your master suite as a parental get-away from the kids, using it during the day or will your non-sleeping uses be restricted to evenings only, meaning that any views from the rooms would be lost to the darkness of the night? If the views are not important, I'd bury the master suite near the garage in the above sketch. If however, views and day time use are important, then I'd move the master to the east/south/west walls, perhaps right off the entry or in the back off of the kitchen. I'm not necessarily saying to put the master off the entry or off the kitchen, though you could, I'm just using these as examples that reference the above sketch. The way I'm designing my own home is to use a very self-reflective process which tries to understand how I actually live my life rather than trying to contort my lifestyle into architectural trends which presuppose how people SHOULD live their lives. So, to continue on the questioning, why exactly do you appreciate a main-floor master? Is it so that you can avoid stairs? Is it so that you can hear the comings and goings of the kids at night as they try to leave the house, is it because you don't want the kids too near your bedroom, is it because you don't want noise transmission from the master to be easily heard by the kids, and so on? Once you can articulate to yourself why you want something then you can find the best solution for your plan, rather than adopting a cookie-cutter approach. For instance, what I found amusing in some plans was a main floor master with a child's bedroom directly over it on the 2nd. Now, to me, if the goal was to reduce noise transmission from either the child's room to the parent's room or vice versa, the separation by floor, while having intuitive appeal, would fail to achieve the mission. The example I used in an earlier comment was to have a master suite separated by a stairway corridor AND a children's hallway which together create a 7'-8' dead zone, possibly with some walls other than the master and child's bedroom walls also added in between. There are no common walls shared, there is a huge dead zone in between and the goal of reducing noise transmission is, I believe, better served than a downstairs master with an upstairs child's bedroom directly over top, sharing common ceiling/floor as well as sound transmission paths down the walls. Of course, if sound transmission has nothing to do with the appeal of a downstairs master suite, then what I've sketched out is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist, or doesn't matter. I was thinking the master/office space on one side and then the kitchen, dining, great room on the other. That makes sense to me. Would you move the great room from the center of the house below to the front where the dining study is and move the study to where the great room is? Lots of configurations can make sense, but they must make sense in relation to how you envision yourself using the space and the particulars of your lifestyle and preferences. I'd say grab some graph paper, or even blank paper, and just block out the rooms and see how they interplay with each other, note how you foresee traffic patterns within and throughout the space, imagine daily routines taking place within the space. Once you have an idea of how you live, or how you want to live in the new space, then get the graph paper and try to get a better handle on size and furniture placement, and traffic patterns and by the end of this process you should have a very good understanding of how you want the space to be configured. I did the same for my house and this has resulted in me doing away with a formal living room from the now traditional LR/FR combo pack and reallocating the space elsewhere in the home, such as combining the entry with the LR space in order to create a larger sense of space/volume, has led me to create a larger kitchen than would be warranted in relation to the size of the informal living room, has led me to other design changes that likely violate what trained architects use as benchmarks for how homes should be designed. Thank you for the garage tip also - I thought 24x24 was rather large? We will be getting an oversize door for sure. I'd say measure your cars, block out a 24 x 24 space on your lawn, use cardboard boxes or something else to fill the space of your cars, then throw in the other junk you're likely to store alongside the walls of the garage, and see how much space you actually need. Try to get out of your car and see if the door bangs the wall or the other car. A 24 x 24 garage is actually pretty good considering that many designed give a 20 x 23 or something similarly ridiculous.

kgwlise, so funny you say this. Read on. First I was going to report that I tried on the whole shebang yesterday -- dress with Spanx hose and shoes. I was pleased. As pesky said, no one's going to think I'm supermodel thin, but somehow that saddlebag bulge did not seem as evident. And, I could breathe! (I bought the Spanx on the larger side.) Now here's the funny part. I got on the scale this morning and have lost 4 lbs. since Monday! Obviously I was retaining water, as kgwlisa suggested. But it normally takes me forever to lose one pound, so this was kinda thrilling. I am now one pound less than I was before the trip. Now, if I can keep this going...? I want to lose 8-9 more pounds! So, in the end, maybe the Spanx, combined with my actual loss, will actually make it look like I lost 5 lbs. in 5 days!! LOL.