For Lindyb SDLM is not bad to ball for me. I occasionally 'ease' open an early or very late bloom-chilly weather seems more of a balling indicator here-but in the main it opens with no problems-Surprised me as well especially as my plant is not in a very good spot. I also have Souv. de St Anne's a and you are right, it is a lovely thing. Catsrose..my the point was that apparently many Cut rose breeders believed that scent shortened vase life(the rotting gene?) so bred it out of their roses. That they thought so does not make it true. I gather the primary purpose of their breeding was to produce a flower that would stay in 'the bud' as long as possible with as long a stem as possible. I do wish I could remember where I read this-I have a number of books on greenhouse propagation and so on. Oh well. patricia

Ingrid - Congratulations! I too am constantly asking my husband to see something amazing in the garden - he tries to be polite, but can barely stop himself from yawning. I also have a happy story about DdB. I have a really ancient plant, at least 50 years old, probably older. However, I did not even know it was there for years, because it was sort of surrounded and eaten by my huge Le Vesuve. Finally I noticed that one or two flowers of the Le Vesuve were a different color, form, etc. Eventually I realized that there was an old plant of DdB inside of the LV! You could not see hardly any of the bush, just a few blooms every year. Well, 15 years went by, and the winter before last the LV died back on one side - about the far 4 feet of its width just died. So, I cut out the dead wood. That was the side where the DdB was lurking. Low and behold - the DdB must have taken advantage of its liberation over this past Winter. I noticed a few days ago (it is now blooming) that I can actually see an entire DdB plant which is about 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall, and covered in blooms! That's why I love old roses - they persevere! Mine is the many petaled kind, and just stunning. Oh, another thought - re your comment that some bug has drilled a hole in the bud - sounds like that awful little red beetle (I forget its name). They do not come in ones, so you might want to look around and see if you see more. They look just like ladybugs, except no spots, and they have a long long nose which they use to drill holes in rose buds! You have to pick them off (they fall straight down if disturbed, so I hold a bag or something below them). You also have to get rid of the buds with the holes - they are now full of beetle eggs. Jackie

I don't know what my garden style is. The garden has well-defined beds and paths, and has an air of rustic formality, if that isn't an oxymoron. I mean, partly, that it has a fair amount of structure: some hedges, of lavender, of box, of yew, but the plants are loosely trimmed; and the wide grass paths, some roughly terraced so that you don't need one leg longer than the other to walk on them, are pasture grass, tidy only when recently mowed. There are areas with steps, often made with sections of small tree trunk or large limbs, and a few terraced areas, flat places in the universal slope. All these elements give structure: they do wonders in changing a piece of ground into a garden. I've tried to choose plants that walk that line between too-great formality and a completely wild look. There are plants that are widely used here in suburban gardens: English laurel, a number of cotoneasters, Hybrid Teas, of course, eleagnus, especially variegated, pittosporum--others I can't call to mind. They're mostly good plants when properly used. Often they're not properly used, for one thing; and for another, I don't much like the look even of a well-planned typical Italian suburban garden--too many exotic plants, too many exotic-looking plants, too much glossy evergreen, too many bright flowers (roses in particular), too much brightness and glossiness and rigidity overall; and Italians tend to be maniacally orderly in their maintenance. Anyway, many of these popular plants are good in my garden when discretely employed, rather than grouped all together without any lower voltage plants. I like some of the cotoneasters--C. lactea is a lovely shrub, for example; and in one shaded spot I have a couple of exotic shrubs, a pittosporum and a nandina, but diluted by box and bay laurel so they look at home. That suburban garden look is the direct esthetic descendent of the 'orto', the vegetable garden: the order, the brightness--substitute Hybrid Tea blooms for big red round tomatoes--the pruning and weeding and hoeing. There's no room for spontaneity, no conception of Nature as collaborator rather than enemy. I'm enlarging on this because I have a vague but different idea of the formal garden. That I see likewise as controlled, but with restraint in color, with subtlety of texture, with a pleasing architecture, I mean in the use of volumes and voids. Perhaps more definitely than anything else, I imagine a good formal garden as possessing dignity, a quality almost invariably lacking in Italian suburban gardens, whatever their other virtues. Our garden is set in the middle of the countryside, and it has to take this setting into account: if I had a garden in town it might not look like any of my neighbors', but it would be different from what I'm working on now. Most of my plants aren't native either, but they don't look screamingly inappropriate to me. I like a lot of what I thnk of as classic English garden plants: old roses, lavender, peonies, clematis. Tall bearded iris, lilacs, semi-evergreen small-leaved ligustrum, forsythia and shrub honeysuckle, hazelnuts, Viburnum lantana and snowball bush look right--some are native--and grow well. This isn't complete, but it is long, for all you folks and for me. An innocent question got me started on thoughts I've been turning over in my head for some time. Melissa

I am sorting the seed packets, ladies, and they will be in the mail to you tomorrow. There were not a lot of seeds that matched your wish lists, but if there were any, I sent them. However, you will definitely find lots of interesting seeds and no two alike (i.e. if there were two packets of marigold or zinnias, the varieties were labeled and you got more than one packet of marigolds and zinnias but they are of different varieties...) Anyway, I hope everyone is happy with their seeds. You are getting a few more packets than what you sent. First of all, I added some that I marked "free" that were older than 2006 - yes, I would have some of those... LOL... and I just added some newer ones, too, when I had lots of a certain kind. And secondly, some of the packets had lots of seeds in them and seemed so interesting that I wanted more than one person to get to try them, so I divided some up a bit more. Hope that was okay. Anyway, I had fun being hostess and happy fall and happy planting! Thanks for joining in on the first Petal Pushers swap that I have hosted. Jeanne