Greg and Joan, I'm looking forward to more pics from you two! Golden Pagoda is intriguing. You don't see that one much, and I bet it gets very prominent points in the Houston heat. Joan, maybe you hire a little crew of teenagers every Spring Break to help you out with those 200 trees! Can't wait to see the blooms that are developing here, and you bet I'll post when I get a chance. Robert, that Lemon Drop is Thornton's and one of only a few big ones I have. It's certainly the "branchiest". That's what you can look forward to in a few more years! Bill, our little guy gets us invited back to a lot of places! We would all love to go back to CA soon. Will definitely let you know if we get a chance. K, glad the seeds are coming up for you; they're the perfect flowers for a Texas drought! Yes, that is TLD on the tree because my memory is just THAT bad, lol. Sometimes I abbreviate and then ask myself, "Now what the heck does that stand for again?" Dave, thanks for the compliments! I'm in Austin. We're 8b but I've seen at least one big plumeria tree kept in the ground all winter in my neighborhood. It can be done in a sheltered spot with frost cloth since our freezes are all short-lived. Mike, I found another possible oh-please-let-it-be inflo today, so I feel like I won the lottery! Hope you also have a great bloom year!

We live in Central Indiana and have a home in Southern Indiana. We have had so much rain. Over the Easter weekend we had so much flooding in the south. Our home is located outside of French Lick, Indiana. The business part of town was so badly flooded. Our home out of town sits up on a hill. The neighbor man said we had 2 cars parked up in our drive and the water was up to the windows. The water was up to within 6 inches of the bottom of the stop sign at the corner. We have never seen water this high before. My hubby went down later on in the week and it still looked like a lake across the road. We have had more then enough rain...

Oh geeze. Thanks for the kind words. Very much appreciated but not necessary. :) Garden Web is my occasional mental vacation/distraction from a hectic real life. As much as I love color, it's nice to come here and read about other stuff.

This was our itinerary and we stuck to it pretty well. It all worked in that it kept us busy and going the whole time without a lot of driving in between. I think our longest straight drive was 2 hrs. Day 3, we lucked out and just caught up with a walking tour by a docent from the Museum of NM History which lasted 2 hours and he pointed out a nice place to have lunch inside an old hacienda. Day 4, after the horseback ride, we didn't feel a need to go back to chimney rock as we'd seen it on the horseback ride which was *fabulous*. But we did spend time hiking Plaza Blanca which was also incredible. Day 8, we hit Bandolier really early, before 8am so we had time to then hit Valles Caldera, which one of the wranglers at ghost ranch recommended. So glad we did and so glad we had a 4 wd vehicle which handled the 14 miles of dirt road just fine. And Day 8/9, Jemez springs, we didn't really "see" but drove through the canyon to stay at this little luscious place by the creek with a view, did a lot of relaxing and meditating, and got a couples massage (thank you mtnrd) before heading off to the airport to return home.