What a great day for the Plant Swap. Thanks to everyone that attended today who helped make it a wonderful day. Great plants, folks, food, and friends. So fun to meet new folks who attended this year for the first time. A special thanks to folks that were so helpful. It's been terrific to be part of this event the past eleven years. I appreiciate all of you. I love to look at my gardens and see plant swap plants growing away, some for many years. I know I have some some terrific friends via this event, too. A special thanks to Mimi - my wonderful back door gardening friend. I know the Plant Swap will carry on! Thanks to Mouse and Kim (and friends) for stepping forward to host the swap in the future. My biggest thanks goes to my very, very special Murray. Good gardening!

I'm sorry to hear of the snake's demise, but I do understand that it is easy to panic when a snake is inside the house and you have a little one. For future reference, this was indeed a harmless banded water snake, and would not have posed any kind of problem to you at all. The main reason you can tell it wasn't a diamondback is...no diamonds! The eastern diamondback rattlesnake has very plain diamond shapes on it, rather than bands of color like this one had. Here is a picture for illustration. You can clearly see the diamonds running the length of this snake. Also, don't forget that most of the time diamondback rattlesnakes have RATTLES. Not always, as they can get broken off. But usually. They are heavier bodied than the banded water snake, and the rattles look like a series of buttons at the tip of the tail. In this picture, the rattles are black, but visible. One more picture of a diamondback, showing the diamond pattern, and the rattles. (The tail is held vertical in the center of the coil of this snake, with the tan rattles at the tip.) Notice, also, how really FAT the tail of the rattlesnake is, in comparison to the long, thin tail of the banded watersnake. Your son is darling, and in order to ease your mind if you run across snakes in your house or yard in the future, I highly recommend you learn to identify the very few venomous snakes we have in Florida. In central Florida, that would be two kinds of rattlesnakes (pygmy and eastern diamondback), coral snakes, and cottonmouths (also called water moccasins). They are not very hard to learn to ID, and then if you see a snake that is NOT one of those four, you know it is harmless and can be caught & released, or "swept" out the door with a broom. If you want more info on easy ways to ID these snakes, let me know, and I'll share some past posts and photos that should help. Marcia

According to Andre and Mark Viette (Mid-Atlantic Gardener's Guide, p 197), you can probably grow the Whitespire birch. Here is how the Viette's describe the tree: "One of the most beautiful resistant birches is a single trunk cultivar, the Japanese white birch, B. platyphylla var. japonica 'Whitespire,' introduced by John L Creech, late director of the National Arboretum. It has chalk-white bark enhanced by contrasting triangles of blank at the base of the branches. The bark doesn't peel off and the structure of the tree is very appealing." If you cannot find it or decide against it, you could try Heritage river birch (B. nigra 'Heritage') - it has striking colored peeling bark. Here is a link that might be useful: Whitespire Birch

It's a baby Black Rat Snake(Pantherophis obsoletta), a very common species in Virginia. Most people, I guess, expect the babies to be black like adults are in this region, but that isn't the case. This one is very typical of a hatchling Black Rat.