It is naturalised in Australia and invasive in some places. So check first if you are going to get some. Also invasive in S Africa. It loves walls, pavement cracks, anywhere with sharp drainage and slightly alkaline soil. Spreads by wind born seed and self sows widely. Here's some in a wall near me, along with Campanula portenschlagiana, another wall loving self sower and Ceanothus.

I've enjoyed Doc Martin and will watch for it. Phyllis, as for William and Mary, in my opinion Mary is too mad all the time. Seriously, who needs that? I like the rest of the story--his job, the kids, her mother, etc.--but she's just too unpleasant, often cross and yelling. (Hope I didn't spoil it for anyone.) So maybe you wouldn't like it if you could understand, Phyllis.

Well, I found Doc Martin on Youtube last night, flopped around a bit until I figured out how to watch the pieces of those episodes in order, now may try to find hulu. My education continues. And, instead of retiring at 10pm it was midnite, because I was watching the episodes. It is a great show, low key, but Cornwall reminds me of the Irish countryside as well. If anything, the Irish roads are even narrower, and all those huge tour buses frightened me. Plus, there were rock walls up to the edge of the pavement. I loved it. Where else can you feel like driving in a Grand Prix at 30 miles per hour? Uhhh, kilometres.......cannot wait to go back before I'm so old they won't rent me a car. Our house had just about no places to sit and relax, or do the nicer activities us retired folks enjoy. So we added a 10 x 12 deck. Then enclosed the 10 x 10 porch to make a Lexan-walled sunporch, to house my parrots and allow DH a place to read and watch the outdoors. Then we bumped out the back bedroom to have a walkin closet and a bathtub, because we'd already put in a really tiny 2nd bathroom in the space formerly occupied by 2 tiny closets. I figured we could do without the linen closet and coat closet if it gave us a second crapper and a walkin shower. The footprint of the house, what was under the old roofline, was only increased by the closet/tub bumpout, about 160 sq feet, so the real construction cost for changing the roofline was minimal. However, we did match the stucco exterior to what already existed. Marti, if you are thinking of pushing a bedroom out to the edge of the shallow front gallery porch, I'd begin studying the sunshine it gets there. Quite possibly you could turn that wall into a window seat area with storage on either side so that no change of roofline is required. That is the same way they do attic rooms with reduced headroom where the roofline slopes down. If you are not paying for roofline changes, why not think about doing the same to both of those front bedrooms? I would not want to make the "guest rooms" (the kids' old bedrooms) too cozy and spacious, if you do not want them moving back home. Our neighbors up north have the problem of a son approaching 40 who has never moved out, sleeps all day and works in his room all night designing computer games. This is very restrictive of the parents activities. I just could not do it for long.

I saw him in another pbs series, he is playing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I had to look twice to make sure it was him lol. He really looks different in that. I liked the Doc Martin series for a while then lost interest in it....I'm not sure why...but I thought about the boots first too when I read the title *snork. :)