Christmas Day Ricky Ginsburg - Christmas, any year you'd like Nearly eight thousand miles south of the northern tip of the globe, yet only a few milliseconds flight by sleigh (nine deer-power, greased rails), on an island not much larger than your neighborhood, a content and well-fed deliveryman sat on the trunk of a fallen palm tree and peeled a banana. At the other end of an invisible eight thousand mile-long-string, a black woman with perfectly straightened hair and considerable girth lay naked on a bed of fresh goose feathers and straw, waiting for the driver of said sleigh, just as she'd done for centuries. Only this year, he wasn't coming home. Click to read the rest...

Carol, I already thought of the smuggling. I could add a lot of cuttings of roses like Evelyn for you to play with, along with the Tones, of course. Yeah, a bargain on the fertilizer. I just don't understand the pricing---if the roses from Canada that we buy here are reasonably priced, why is all the US stuff so high priced in Canada? I know, I'm sure you've asked yourself this question many times..... How is your weather? Ours is just awful for it being nearly April, and I haven't started pruning yet. We have icy breezes that make it so much worse. Meanwhile, I'm still forced to look at a dead, big, toppled over Olivia, still slightly attached to the ground. No, she isn't alive, and she looks awful. But everything else still looks awful, too. The roses are all green but that's as far as they have gone with our weather being so unpredictable. Has the horrid vertigo gone away yet? I am hoping so. I'm also tired of posting old pics and want some new stuff to look at. Have you looked at the spring thread and read what Ben posted about the rose hybridizer and head of roses at the Huntington, Tom Curruth? So interesting, and sometimes Carruth posts incognito on the forum. I hope David Austin, jr doesn't come on this forum in disguise. He might not like what we say about his company. Sleep well, Diane Bernstein-Rose My only not very good photo of the calendula I grew for many years (the neighbors old fence is long gone). I was trying to find this to show Deborah. Now the quail won't let me grow calendula. Frederic Mistral, a rose of complicated centers

Merry Christmas to you, Islay. Dcarch, enjoy the weather, you know you'll have to come back sometime, LOL. Here it's 11F, but the winds are down to 15 MPH, so not all that bad. If it gets up to 20F, the salt they put on the roads will be able to melt the ice, and then driving won't be quite as treacherous. All in all, my part of the world got a storm, but not quite as bad as the weather forecasters were predicting. Annie

Glad tidings indeed on the soon to be new grandson. You are so blessed to have your family around you for the holiday. I bet there will be lots of laughter and love to go around..........Merry Christmas Brad and also to all my daylily friends on this forum........Maryl