Yes, Glenda, aren't those rudbeckia outstanding? I'm going to plant a lot more for next year, and add a later planting so I will have some for later in the fall. They are already mostly cut and not coming back very fast. I put the tomatoes in the hoophouse because last summer was really chilly here and absolutely no one had ripe tomatoes until almost September. I pictured myself making a killing at the market this year. That didn't happen. This summer turned out to be a hot one and I didn't get the hoophouse up as soon as I should have. I had to vent the hoophouse in a big way almost every day and I didn't beat anybody to the market with tomatoes. Also, it turns out that I have a lot to learn about growing tomatoes. They look much better than they really are. The plants have been mostly healthy looking, but I've had a lot of blossom-end rot and some other disorder where the tomatoes develop slightly dark soft areas that get bigger as the tomato gets fully ripe. As a result I have had only four or five quarts of good tomatoes from all those plants. I'll do a better job of testing and preparing the soil next year, and hope for better yields. I added only a small handful of bonemeal to each planting hole this year. On the plus side, I've had no late blight or other nasty diseases, so I haven't done everything wrong. TM

Gean, thanks. How's your Pacific Northwest garden going? Hello, Suzy! Thanks! About how I planned the garden, I don't think there was anything in my head that you don't have in yours. I wanted to grow all the plants I love that were suited to my conditions (acidophiles were excluded, for example) in a way that was appropriate to the frame: the Italian countryside. The semi-wild style that called for was exactly suited to my own taste in a garden and in garden plants. Those plants were also the kind that do well with minimal intervention on the gardener's part because they're adapted here (though I do continue struggling with Teas, and we have to go out after a big snowfall and shake the snow off the Italian cypresses and pines, native further south of here). In other words, as you say I honored the genus loci. The main novelty was that I needed to scale up, since this garden was many times larger than anything I'd done before. Also I had views to exploit. I put in a good many trees, including a lot of Italian cypresses since they give a lot of height for the space they take up, and planned on bulky volumes of hedges, beds, and pergolas. I wanted the garden to look good from a distance as well as up close and inside it. I drew up plans beforehand showing the major plants: trees, shrub areas, and rose plantings--lots of rose hedges--and the paths, allowing tractor access, and open areas. I planned the garden, not all at once, but in large self-standing chunks, and trying to ensure that nothing I did would stymie any future ideas. I'm pretty happy with it, though since we started with a poor barren field it will be many more years before it develops an adequate skeleton of trees and large shrubs, and it won't look complete until that happens. Faults and all, and it has many, the garden feels right. Garden design is like morality; you don't need quantities of baggage: just a handful of basic principles and you can deal with anything.

Here are some pix of Ladew Topiary Garden. The owner formed a foundation before he died. It is open to the public and I will have to give the foundation credit, they do a good job under some difficult circumstances. There is also a large manor house, tenant house, stables (now a restaurant), etc. Property owners with extensive plantings really should give careful thought about what happens to their property when they're gone. What I have seen is when owners die, children have the collection bulldozed and the property subdivided. I have also seen a magnificent conifer collection grow up in weeds and ravaged by deer after the owner died, heirs squabbling. For this reason I decided many years ago that the only important areas are the natural ones. The ones that were here 10,000 years ago and hopefully will be here centuries into the future. I do my best to protect and preserve the natural areas, the rest is little more than a fleeting memory of someone's vision which may not always be relevant.

Gmail is also very good at identifying possible spam and sending it to the spam folder. I think my hotmail/outlook is too but I don't use it as much. I gotten the "I've hacked your computer and your webcam and will embarrass you if you don't pay" scams too. But I have no webcam, and haven't done anything too embarrassing in the last twenty years or so anyway... so.. have at it. Delete Forever... and forget. I usually don't get much spam, possibly less since the pandemic. Maybe more OS updates though. Folks maintaining my OS seem to have more free time to code. :-)