Thanks again for the comments! I got some nice pics again last night and will try to post a few more today. I love seeing pics of lilies that others are fond/proud of, as it gives you so much more input than a catalogue. Down side is that if people on this forum rave about something ( like Rocket City, which I tried like crazy to find last fall and EVERYONE was sold out!!), it is sometimes hard to find! Julie, the tag line in my photos is not of the nursery that I have purchased from, but rather the name that I have chosen to use when I trade and/or sell (and hopefully soon register a few seedlings!) We have gotten a little overgrown, and are planning to sell at local farm markets and such, and I wanted a way to assure peopel that the photos that I use when I tag them were really from the plant that they are purchasing! The nursery thing would be a fantastic idea though... although I think that it very likely could overwhelm some of the small growers as it is way too easy to want just about everything that you see on this forum!! Thanks again for all of the comments! Julie

Very nicely put. There is no doubt in my mind that even garden books can be written to convey the writers passion with wit and I dare say it could also be poetic. I wonder sometimes why we settle for less. There are garden writers who carry us along with their enthusiasm; I wouldn't say that Ken Druse is a great writer, yet somehow his books are compelling. In "The Education of a Gardener" Russell Page's schoolboy like enthusiasm makes the words jump off the page but once again I wouldn't call it literature. Karel Capek and Henry Mitchell add a humourous scene that we can easily see ourselves in, even playing a starring role! There is more to gardening and garden writing than the nice 'thank you for sharing' attitude that made Martha the moneyto play with. Yes, I think about this a lot.

This is a great thread. I'm a teacher (though I only do long-term sub jobs right now), and also GT certified and trained. I've also raised two children, one of whom passed all the GT tests as a kindergartner and is now in college. My other child passed a few of the GT tests as a third-grader, but honestly I don't see her as 'gifted.' Part of the problem is that this school district includes achievement tests in the battery of GT tests, which is completely inappropriate, but there it is. And she is an extremely hard-working kid. Anyway, I've always been hugely interested in GT education and absolutely LOVE working with these students. But I'd like to let you in on a couple of dirty little secrets.... The first secret is that there are many teachers, even GT-certified who don't LOVE teaching these kids. In fact, they often appear (to me) to be defensive and ready to shoot down these kids at every opportunity. I think it is difficult for a parent to truly realize this because they aren't in the classroom. But I have witnessed it over and over again.... It's heartbreaking, and I try to intercede when I can, but that isn't always possible. The second 'secret' is about teachers being expected to differentiate instruction for all the levels in the room. It's a joke. Not because the teacher doesn't try. It's just a ludicrous system. It is politically incorrect to group students by ability, and no longer allowed anywhere that I've found. So a typical classroom has students with IQs below 70 and students with IQs above 125, occasionally very far above. Imagine you are trying to teach 25 children something -let's say .... how to knit. Some of your students have been knitting for four years, and some could not tell you what a knitting needle looks like. While you are trying to figure out how to group them, four boys have grabbed needles and are trying to stab each other, two more have grabbed your balls of yarn and tossed them to each other, which has caused them to unravel of course. The girls are yelling at the boys to stop it. Some are crying because they really, really want to learn how to knit. So you finally bring order to the chaos, and figure you can divide them into three groups, which does not truly correlate to the levels in the room, but is the best you can do. You truly need the entire time with each one of the groups. But you only have 1/3 of the time with each of course. And what do you suppose the other two groups are doing while you are working with one? You have given them some books about knitting to keep them occupied, but they are old and have only black and white photos so that isn't terribly successful. So you start with the least experienced group because they need the most time. After you spend ten minutes with the first group, you will barely have begun your session with the second group before a few students from the first group come running over with problems. And then that happens again. So the second group's instruction takes twice as long as it should because of the interruptions. And since the third group's time was used for the second group, suddenly, there's the bell! Guess which group didn't get attended to AGAIN?!?!? You may remember that I was fairly strong-minded in the original post on this subject -and felt you needed to think about removing your daughter from a toxic environment. If she wants to be at this school and the good outweighs the bad, okay. But from the sounds of it, her educational needs are not being met. Which might be okay if you or she are supplementing them at home. The way I see it, there are two types of needs for these kids. The first set of needs is what she needs to get into a college where she will hopefully truly have her abilities matched to her environment. And the second set of needs is what she needs to feed her hungry brain. The first set of needs could be covered in one year rather than four for most of these kids. When the information is drawn out over four years, boredom and frustration set in, and many GT kids simply begin to tune out. Some lose all of their enthusiasm and interest in learning and begin to fail. And then they can't get into the colleges where they might truly flourish for the first time. As I used to tell my son, don't kid yourself -there are some extremely bright people who never made it to college. There is a whole group of gifted dropouts, mostly boys, who didn't get the first set of needs met. And Anele -it sounds to me as if your daughter IS gifted. The sheer fact that she is interested in reading what you describe is a give away. I hope I haven't offended any one here -I am passionate about the short shrift these very top students are getting in the K-12 system, all over the nation. It is a huge loss to them, and a huge loss to our country. It's mind-boggling to me that we put forth so much time, money and energy to the first-string on the football team, but not to the academic team. Okay, stepping down off the soapbox now....

I'm sorta with J on this Lydia. What about a solid floor and a black/white checkered rug, or those carpet squares? It would be warmer, too, which I know is a consideration for you from about Nov thru March. You could do carpet squares in black and white with a red border all the way around. The sofa is so classic and classy, I wonder if the busy floor would mess with that. I love the sofa. In fact, I'd like to see 2 of those in there, instead of the not very comfy looking metal rocker. (I dunno, maybe it's real comfy, but it's not my taste, sorry.) I think that rocker would look better out in the yard or on the front porch. JMO, I know you're good at the shabby chic theme, if anyone can make it work, it's you. Otherwise, I envy you completely. I wanted a sunroom where our back deck is. A FourSeason room. My word! It cost nearly 40% of what our whole house ran! And that was cash, financed it was MORE than the whole house cost.