I stick with our sunsets too. The pictures on spaceweather are awesome. Last night I watched the ISS and shuttle and at the same time the first couple of fireflies of the season showed up. There is a message somewhere in those 2 entirely different lights, I just don't know yet what.

Great post and replies. Really fun to read. Don't forget that lots of leafy greens are excellent crops autumn through spring. I grow a lot of lettuce and other leafy things from October through March or so and really enjoy them, plus all manner of herbs too. You definitely posted to the right forum. :) You might want to check out the Extreme Gardening book by David Owens. It's all about vegetable/edible gardening in the warm-winter deserts of the SW. I'll post a link at the bottom. For scent, stocks and old-fashioned fragrant petunias are great autumn through spring, as are fragrant alyssum. In summer I grow a lot of the old heirloom scented flowering nicotiana (Nicotiana alata, old fashioned types not the newer shorter types that open in daylight but are unscented). The nicotiana blooms all spring through autumn and the flowers open at night and are amazingly fragrant at night (I got the originals from Select Seeds, just make sure they're listed as fragrant). Several types of fragrant jasmine will work for you too, and scented geraniums are always a winner in my book--they are also easier to keep alive through our blast furnace summers than zonal geraniums (which are great autumn through winter of course). I do like blooms and nice scented gardens. Let us know how the dahlias do for you. I think most folks find they are not really good performers here, but you could prove us all wrong. Keep us posted on what you grow and how it works out. Take care, Grant Here is a link that might be useful: Extreme Gardening book

I really, really, really would prefer to do the yard with a ground cover that needs edging a couple times a year, the flower beds I already have planned, maybe a section of desert/sand, rock garden, whatever. I hate grass and I hate maintaining it. I can envision the yard with the flower beds, a rock garden arrangement on the slope, all sorts of things. But unfortunately, I don't get the deciding vote. The family caved on the rose beds and a few other things, so I traded - I keep the plants, the dogs and get to add some garden stuff, they get the lawn. Diplomacy at work. I am trying to reduce the size of the grass, though, add more foliage and so on that will remain sedate but cut back on the stupid lawn. Still working on squeezing in the yellow brick road, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the lilliputian village and a couple other silly things. I already won the dolphin and the hippo. Might be able to manage the gargoyles but I had to give up the koi pond. Not asking for much, am I?

Patty - what you describe is exactly what my SS was doing last year. Picture the long canes wirosarian has in that great photo (lovely garden scene wirosarian), just bunched up under the trellis for safekeeping. 3' high ad 4-5' of floppy cane is what she had last year. This year it's more like 8' of floppy cane, but that definitely seems to be her growth habit. I can't see her being a hedge (even though mine might look like one) unless you had a set of hoops under it to prop up all those floppy canes at the desired height. Yep, land sakes alive - she's a sprawler - nothing happened except she was feeling happy and verrrrrry relaxed. Annececelia- you think I'd FEED that monster? I'm not getting within a foot of it until it stops eating the landscape. Seriously, I rarely get around to feeding my roses anything but alfalfa most years, and I don't think SS has ever gotten any. You must treat yours right to keep her mannerly. At least until your back is turned (da-DUm, da-DUm, da-DUm...) Cynthia