Thank you everyone for your kind words and good words of hope for my garden. I know the perenials will come back. A lot of my 2nd year wintersowing was in this garden as well as comeback annuals that were also wintersown...doubt those will come back. The worst part about this whole mess is we didn't have a shingle roof put on, it's a metal roof and they didn't have to remove anything from the roof (big part of the reason we went with metal was to avoid the damage the old shingles would do to the gardens). If they had just used a 10ft longer ladder and stayed two steps out they wouldn't have hurt a thing. I wanted to do the roof last fall but we were put on a waiting list and this was when they were available to do ours. There really is no excuse for the damage. mnwsgal...I hope your experinece is much better than mine... linda...I read about your waterline replacement nightmare, that is terrible and I'm sorry for the bad topsoil...I know how hard it is to improve that. They are almost done with the roof and I am keeping my fingers crossed that the rest will be less traumatic to my garden. Thanks again for the kind words. Bonny

Love Spills Over is a great daylily here. As are all of the Bell daylilies I grow...I'm a big fan of his plants. While mine is not as dark as the one in the picture on his website...it is usually darker than the one you have pictured. Hasn't bloomed yet this year and I am on the wrong computer to look for a picture...sorry. I think that is the best picture I have seen of Henry Boykin. Heavens Declaring looks lovely. What a funny name for a vivid daylily, Greywoods Toothache Purple. Enjoyed your pictures very much!

Thanks everybody! Yeah Bustopher, we're definitely in a drought situation. We didn't get enough rain to build up hardly any snowpack in the upper Sierras. Not much run-off, so the creeks and reservoirs are getting extremely low. We're on every-other-day water rationing. They initially wanted us to cut back water use by 20-25% which for me is fine, because I over-watered last yr. So far, the roses are doing ok.

I agree, thank you so much for sharing the details of your trip! It sounds like you are truly having the adventure of a lifetime :-)