I heard back from the seller, who told me the strange spotting was harmless. I told her I found scale and asked if the plant had been treated. I'm waiting for her response. I'm so glad I also consulted everyone here, or I would've trusted her and left the plant alone! Jane, thanks for all the advice. I actually found an old post of yours about a soap, oil, and alcohol spray. I'll be trying that, or maybe a dip in the same solution, tonight. A dip sounds more effective to me than the spray, and my plants are small. I want to dip both the orchid and the Hoya cv. Mathilde that was shipped with it, then spray every 2 weeks, like you said, going forward. Does that sound like a good plan? There's a third plant that was next to these 2 for a day. (Not much plant space left in the room.) It's a Primulina tamiana, which has fuzzy leaves. On second thought, the hoya has hairy stems. How should I treat these plants? I've read oil and alcohol sprays aren't good for fuzzy leaves, but no one recommends an alternative. How easily/quickly does scale spread to other plants? Arthurm, I'm not sure what you mean by pristine wilderness stuff...? I thought the plant looked pretty good at first too, especially with the new growth and spikes. I usually convert my plants to semihydro, so don't have overwatering issues. Speaking of media, will repotting help with the pest situation? Or will the additional stress be too harmful? I actually have some hydroton ready to go. The other plants can wait. Cynthia

Thanks, I sometimes think what I'd do if I moved back to the Great North, and couldn't grow 'Mermaid' or my Tea roses, I think I'd grow more Scotch Burnet and Alba roses probably. Two more roses I love, Marie Curie' the older one from the 1940's, and 'Dr. Brownell' 1964 A note about Pernetiana roses, since we're discussing yellow roses for cold climates. This will be old news to many of you but I thought I'd add it . Some gardeners today, take yellow remontant roses of a strong hue, for granted. But until 1900 there were no deep yellow remontant roses that could be grown in a cold climate until 1900, when Monsieur Pernet-Ducher introduced "Soliel d'Or', a golden orange cold hardy, remontant rose. He had intended to breed a yellow Hybrid Perpetual, by using R. foetida 'Persiana' crossed with a garden rose hybrid. His rose became the primogeniture rose of an entirely new class of rose, named Pernetiana after him, a group of cold hardy flame and yellow roses. That class is now subsumed into Hybrid Tea, but I'd like it to remain for historical reasons. I recently wandered through a Pernetiana collection and saw planted near it 'Marie Curie' syn Quebec , which was introduced about a decade after the Pernetiana era, it is a wonderfully clear yellow and has semi-glossy green foliage which makes it more disease resistant than most flame and yellow hued roses. Because that gorgeous wild rose, 'Persiana' introduced the tendency for modern roses to get blackspot in a really big way. I was amazed and pleased to see that a very pretty clear medium yellow rose named 'Marie Curie' was being sold this month by the largest Canadian nursery, but darn and darn again, it is a new cultivar given the same name. I hate it when two roses have the same name. The very pretty yellow rose I love named 'Marie Curie' has the synonym of 'Quebec' and it is more disease resistant to p.m, b.s. and rust, than 90% of the more than 250 rose cultivars in a local public no-spray garden in Oakland, California. I have a letter of permission to take cuttings there and I intend to take some this summer. Hortico.com just added "Dr. Brownell" to their catalog and I'm pleased to see it, of all the buff-apricot modern roses, it is one of my 3 favorites, because the blooms are so large and hefty, with rounded bases and a more relaxed bloom style than the typical post-Peace H.T.. The bush is very attractive; a wide and spreading plant, here c. 4 and 1/2 feet tall by 5 and 1/2 feet wide, with lots of dark green leaves, with big rounded leaflets. It is also in my list of the top 10% of the most disease resistant roses, grown locally, where powdery mildew is the main culprit and blackspot a runner up. Lux.

Frolic away, then, and keep the pictures coming. I have three Plumies grown from seeds, one of which has flowered for the first time last September, an "ordinary" yellow. No inflos yet this year, but I'm not giving up. Thanks again for the garden tour.

Actually, I didn't make that implication. I mentioned that foliar applications of nutrients have a place and can be effective, usually within a very narrow set of parameters, and to varying degrees depending on plant material, what nutrient is deficient, what you're using, how it's applied, often WHEN it's applied. A grower's program might be described as 'willy nilly' when the grower uses foliar applications of nutrients w/o answers to critical questions and especially when they don't even understand the questions, the answers to which determine efficacy. That's simply flying blind, and makes willy nilly is a fair adjective. Foliar aps of nutrients can't/don't work unless there is actually a deficiency of the nutrients you are supplying. In the case where multiple nutrients are being supplied, it's possible that a deficiency mighty be corrected at the same time a toxicity is being introduced because you're supplying a nutrient that is already amply available, which means that more of same has only the potential to limit. A well-reasoned approach to nutrition would find the grower answering a number of questions related to the potential to improve things or add to the number of factors that are potentially limiting. Absent tissue and or soil analysis, if foliar applications have a notable value when used on plants that can actually absorb nutrients from foliar applications, it lies more in its ability to act as an aid in identifying a deficiency than actually relieving one, but the act of applying a number of nutrients all at the same time eliminates any potential help from that quarter because when all is done, you won't likely have fixed the issue and still won't know which nutrient applied. Linda Chalker-Scott is a horticultural scientist with a PhD. She is probably most noted for helping the growing community by debunking horticultural myths, one of which is the assertion that foliar applications are an effective/efficient way to provide plant nutrition. How well and how thoroughly we qualify our offerings with facts rather than observations/statements that are often very subjective or biased serves not only to illustrate our grasp of the topic, it also serves to keep our credibility intact. When we actually have the best interest of the grower at the forefront and are providing reliable, well-qualified information, what sells it is our credibility. I've always limited myself to operating only within the limits of my knowledge, which is why whenever anything I say is challenged, I have all the facts I need at my disposal to back my offering. I never have to rely on selling my offering by using statements like "It works for me" or it might not be the best way, but ........ Dr Scott takes on the topic of Foliar Feeding, here. If you take the time to peruse her offering, you'll find her and my qualifying information amazingly close to the same, so it's not as though I'm a lone voice in the wilderness on this topic or operating beyond the limits of my knowledge. The crux of the issue is, it's very unlikely you'll gain any real traction via foliar feeding, and more likely you'll end up worse off than when you started, even if the plant ends up looking prettier (I qualified that statement above, too). I hope Dr Scott's offering helps us get to the point where we needn't keep belaboring this and similar points. Al