Every year I plant Grandpa Otts morning glory seeds and plants. That way I have flowers early and all season long. This year, two plants have drowned and disappeared in our unusually rainy May and June, and the other two are petering out though they have put out a couple of puny flowers three inches from the ground. The seedlings did well a week or so and then have slowly disappeared. I have lost well-established agastache, nepeta, and lamium. I lost an expensive new variety of bleeding heart. My miniature Joe Pye weed is wilting at the top, and I am going to try to pinch these to see if it stimulates better growth now that the sun is finally here. These are disappointments due to the weather, and I am sure I will have more to come. My coneflowers are in early bud, but the plants look spindly. I expect some disappointments there, too. I have also had some disappointments due to mislabeling of plants. I don't like orange, but the burgundy gallardia that I bought is just starting to bloom, and it looks a lot like Goblin. I have a funky neon peachy-orange-colored red hot poker which I put next to the soft yellow one I had bought the year before to increase its numbers. Finally, a white boltonia is really a pink boltonia. Which is really not a disappointment, except the pink boltonia tends to flop for me.

We have tons of snakes out here. So far this spring we have seen several rat snakes and some black racers, but we also have rattlesnakes, coral snakes (we now know, lol), water moccasins and I am certain many many other harmless species. The coral snake I had to remove from my greenhouse was, as you said, very shy. It had gotten in and gotten "stuck"...it was all the way at the back wall and couldn;t seem to find the way out again. It would go from one end of the greenhouse, following the wall, to the other, turn around, and repeat. I watched it do that for several minutes and realized that I didn't want to be working in there around it while it was being a poor lost soul so I had to scoop it up and take it out. They sure are pretty. I am so glad that that boy is getting better. I would hate to think of it being my child.

I just had a young but fat black racer jump over my head when I bend down to turn on a hose faucet a couple days ago. That was the most dangerious snake I've encountered in a long time. Like to have given me a heart attack.

Thanks for the inputs. I've read in some forums that cedar is harmful to pet snakes. As for snake repellent, I did get some at Houston Garden Center and put it under the garage door where the little (if you can call 2 feet little) brown snake liked to get and haven't seen him since. On the other hand, it left a shed the last time I saw him and that may be why he was in there in the first place. Clint the Snake Man is coming by tomorrow to take a look at the property and give some suggestions as to what to cut back and what not too. I think I'm going to just start weed-eating everything in the back yard rather than trying to keep it landscaped. We live next to a nature area which is cut pretty close and have a power line easement on the other side. We do have some copperheads around but I've only seen one and it had evidently died of dehydration. I grew up with them in Tennessee and have had dogs bitten by them, but they would usually just "tree" any snake and bark at them until someone came. We had a lot of Bluejays around and they would start hollering whenever a snake got in a tree. It seems to me I've seen chicken snakes (rat snakes in Texas) in cedars but that was a long time ago and I'm not sure. By the way, I understand that the supply of antivenom for coral snake bit is nearly exhausted and the supplier doesn't make it anymore. Clint tells me that there is a good one in Mexico but it hasn't been approved by the FDA yet so the only option for a person bitten by one is to put them on life support until the venom has passed.