'Life is filled with trade-offs. My dedication to roses is not lessened if I select more carefully, or even reduce the numbers in my garden.' Of course not! Moving from a sunny allotment to a shady poplar plantation is surely nothing to do with climate but everything to do with location and geographical conditions and like it or not, I will be bidding adieu to nearly ALL my roses apart from the best (in my opinion) which, fortuitously happen to be my treasured wildlings. And even then, roses such as moyesii are just not going to manage, even around the edges. But hey, I am a gardener and the world is full of fabulous plants: even in a poplar wood there are campions, umbellifers, flag iris, bluebells, wild arums, water mints, agrimony, willowherb..........and I have not even lifted a hand. Just wait till the seed orders are sent in........and a bit of chainsawing and judicious felling. Ingrid, the climate changes are neither here nor there - what is mostly apparent is your changing attitudes to plants and their place in the world - this is, I think, a sign of increasing knowledge and experience and (should) happen to us all ....as long as we remain open to learning new things, staying curious and directed and mostly, situating ourselves somewhere in the middle of our little worlds and not perched at the top of the life tree in all-knowing judgmental superiority.

I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland hills, about 25 miles from Romando. Here it is always 5 degrees warmer but much less windy and on the edge of the fog belt, so it is much sunnier. I truly wish Sunset would break up its zone map of area #17, which covers a large area where temps differ 15-20 degrees from one end to the other, with much less fog at the outer borders of #17, leading to much greater temp fluctuations on a daily basis. In many cities located 10+ miles from the coast, it's common to have a 25-40 degree difference between day/night temps, especially in summer. These cool nights are why roses and citrus do so well in the East Bay counties; almost everyone has a lemon or orange tree in the front or back. A number of older EBay homes have the unfortunate choice of giant redwood trees taking up an entire front yard bed - a once-popular but very poor choice for an urban lot. Gardening here is year-round. There is no 'off' season, which can be a bit tiring (no end, ever, to weeding!) but the rewards are HUGE. Some plants flower all the time - polygonum, lantana, aptenia groundcover, pelargoniums, osteospermums, cestrum, euryops, solanum jasminoides vine. Winter bloomers like hellebore (foetidus and argutifolius) can last 6+ months with flowers. Citrus blooms scent the air. Spring starts in mid-February, when the winter rains encourage the leafing out of freesias, nasturtiums, and CA poppies. The one month it's dreary - January - suddenly changes to those fresh new greens everywhere. The hideously invasive but pretty weed Oxalis pes-caprae shows up everywhere, turning even neglected gardens and vacant lots into a sea of soft clover-shaped leaves and nodding stalks of pale yellow flowers. Coleonema and rhaphiolepsis burst into bloom, and erysimums start flowering in yellow and lilac. Oxalis siliquosa, a non-invasive species, puts up little yellow flowers like the charmer it is. March is fast and furious, with callas and iris blooming, Japanese maples showing buds, azaleas and rhodies beginning to bloom. My roses start blooming in March (and are still offering a few blooms in mid-December). Daffodils are everywhere, as Oakland has given away free bulbs for several years now and people plant them in the median strips. Wisteria begins to show some green, but hardenbergia is far more floriferous and starts throwing out its purple racemes for an earlier and longer show. Leptospermum and ceanothus put on their once-a-year display of beauty, making them almost worth the 10 months of boring dull dark green the rest of the time. April and May are the showiest in my garden because nasturtiums and CA poppies have reseeded wildly. I yank them out by the handful to keep them from smothering my evergreen perennials, just leaving some to give those bright pops of color. The weather starts to warm because it's early summer now, so hydrangeas are leafing out like crazy even as the rhodies continue their show. Lavender - I have both English and Spanish - come into bloom. I have a single clematis and am glad I didn't plant more. They just can't compete with the evergreen vines, and their short bloom season just doesn't seem worth it. Out here, perennial morning glories are 45' monsters that crush fences while remaining in bloom for six months or more. My gladiolas are weeds - pretty, but weeds nonetheless, dropping bulblets everywhere. June is full summer here. The rains ended a month or more previous, and there'll be no more rain until mid-October. The soil warms up, so the dahlias will start and hydrangeas begin blooming, even as the nasturtiums and callas start to fade because they hate "warm feet". One of my bearded iris varieties is deciduous and blooms only this one month; unlike my other iris which are spring/fall rebloomers. Limonium starts to come up, always a good pairing with the roses for bouquets. My prized Lavatera olba "Aureum" blooms this month as well, with its gorgeous flower spikes of lavender-pink singles (it's related to hibiscus and the blooms are like mini-hibiscus, but multiples on single spikes). July dries out the garden. The nasturtiums fade, the CA poppies set seeds. But the roses are massive, the passionflower vines have encouraged lots of Gulf Fritillary butterflies. Ceratostigma gives bright burst of blue. Agapanthus send up their allium-like flower stalks: light blue, medium blue, purple, white. Cannas prove they are not really water hogs although they look better with summer water. The hills are all golden, and fire season is now a huge concern. August and September continue the same theme. The year-round bloomers keep trucking along, responding to deadheading by blooming again and again. Argyranthemums, aeoniums, Shasta daisies, dahlias, and chrysanthemums abound. Lavender reblooms in Sept/Oct. October is when the rains return. It's planting time in CA, even as the selection in the nurseries begins to fade. We can put away the hoses, but cleanup of deciduous litter starts now and continues for the next couple of months. The nights turn cooler, and we get some fall color from Japanese maples, Liquidamber (sweetgum) and Chinese pistache trees, even as the ever-bloomers keep up the flower show. November is cleanup leaf litter month, and enjoying the last of the heirloom tomatoes from the farmers markets. December is when we who live on hills worry about mudslides and flooded basements/garages; this and January are prime weeding time because the rains have sprouted all the chickweed, oxalis, dandelion, and Bermuda grass seeds. Mid- to late January is when the roses get cut back, and then it all starts over again.

Totally dry here in West Tennessee. AND I ordered a bunch of rose bands to arrive when the heat wave hit. Got it under control though! They are in the shade and misted 5 times a day. I have been alternating watering the food garden, and the flower gardens each day with sprinklers that run for a good hour each time. But before I started the watering it was a mess of things starting to give up the ghost. I just decided to keep putting the water on everything. When you have a lot of money invested in plants, you get upset thinking that spending a lot on water is the only thing you can do, but there ya go. I was rewarded with the crepe myrtles blooming like crazy, even though it's over 105 degrees for a whole week. I water early mornings and late evenings. Keeps me cool too! NOTE: When I started this whole process, I watered for two hours, and stuck my finger in the dirt around the plants. An inch down it was STILL bone dry. So I stuck the end of the hose INTO the dirt around the plants until it started soaking it up. That was a hot day outside too.

Kim, Hooray for the miraculous recovery. I had a lemon garden for a couple of years and it was one of the most fun things I've ever done. It was so fun to hunt down all the plants that had lemon scents, lemon colors and lemony names. I still have my potted lemon tree. Don't forget Lemon Boy tomato for your lemon garden! Hazel, There are people who take theme gardens to extremes that I never would, but that is partly because I grow so many edibles. Many (though not all) theme gardens are built around a backbone of small trees, shrubs and perennials that fit the theme, with annuals as needed. Within the confines of growing an edible garden with only a few perennials on the edges, I have grown rainbow gardens many times---where each raised bed featured one color of the rainbow, in the same order that the colors appear in the rainbow. I did that for 4 or 5 years and it really broadened my exposure to veggies, herbs and flowers of every color. Of course, the colors green and blue were the most challenging as this was well before we had actual blue tomatoes, but I still grew an old heirloom variety of tomato called "Blue" though it certainly did not have blue fruit. It had fruit that was blackish-pinkish-purplish and wasn't worth eating either. I'd like to do it again sometimes, but it does take an enormous amount of planning, plus an enormous amount of seed-starting to have plants from every color of the rainbow. Still, I'm glad I did it. I'd never grown many green flowers before that (only Envy zinnia) and found it fun to grow Bells of Ireland, Green Wizard rudbeckia and green-flowering gladiolus. I was younger then and had a lot more energy and spent a lot more time in the garden in the heat of the summer. I've also grown a Chocolate Garden at times, featuring plants that produced dark flowers, dark foliage or dark produce (Chocolate popcorn, chocolate tomatoes like Cherokee Chocolate and Chocolate Stripes, Chocolate Habanero peppers, etc), dark colored flowers (basically dark red or maroonish flowers that could sort of pass for chocolate), and chocolate-scented flowers. Just thinking about all the work I did with those theme gardens in those years makes me tired now. I wonder where I found the energy back then? Dawn