Larry, we are still in a drought here in OKC. The nice thing about snow is, altho it doesn't equal as much moisture as one would think (is it 10:1?), when it melts, it soaks in at a slower rate, and the ground actually gets more moisture than a hard rain, a lot of which runs off. Dawn, if we had a sustained cold, we would have probably had more plant damage. The ground is still warm, too. I don't know how the trees were affected, but plants lower to the ground were affected very little, if at all. You are absolutely right, Dawn, the GCs get a lot more attention. They grow faster than my plants, and I don't want to miss a moment in time. OT: The death of Whitney Houston this weekend, is just another reminder of how short life is. I was truly saddened by events. Her music got me thru a very difficult time in my life back in the 80s and I was a great admirer of her. Larry, I signed up for your Facebook page, but I'm not very good about posting. I will definitely read it, though, and thank you for friending me! Susan

Jill, At our local fire station, two different female killdeer had their nests in the gravel driveway/parking area that encircles all 4 sides of the station. Luckily, they were out on the farther edges of the gravel so the guys could drive those big old firetrucks past them/around them. One of the guys even found and rescued a tiny baby bird who got washed out of his nest during a particularly hard rain. We had a whole summer of little killdeer dances too. Later in the season, there were a couple more nests, this time just on the edge of the bar ditch, right where the gravel gradually gave way to bar ditch weeds. The nests were safer there, but the mama birds had to do their dance a lot more....every time someone drove in or out of the parking lot! We have roadrunners here and see them pretty often, although not on a daily basis. Last week I saw my first baby roadrunner ever--I've only seen adults before. It was absolutely the cutest thing. Dawn

We are having wind in the high teens with gusts to 25mph. It is snowing right now (may be graupel or just go straight to styrofoam). This is a little better weather than yesterday and certainly better than Friday & Saturday. Tuff spring weather and it just seems like winter won't let go. . . David, your roof story reminds me of working on the big glass greenhouses back in my youth. Surely, you can find a younger person to get up there and do that work. During a windstorm, it seemed hard to decide whether it was safer inside the greenhouse or outside. Certainly, you'd want to be upwind of a large structure made of a single layer of GLASS! Of course, they'd often lose glass and if it got very bad - out we'd go with roof ladders, caulking guns, and replacement glass. Whoa!! You never realize until times like those that you can hold on, not only with fingers and toes, but with knees, ankles, elbows, and wrists. All the while, pinning a loose piece of glass down with your forehead, nose and cheek . . . I enjoyed something called "bouldering" during those days. It was just kind of a natural evolution from roof work. I mean, anything was more reasonable than climbing where your safety net was thin wood glazing bars and glass. . . . malfunctioning autoimmunity put a stop to all that, before malfunctioning self-preservation did. Steve

Thanks for the good advice and congrats on your all native garden! The whole issue of watering natives is a biggie for me. I've already had several Ribes die on me for what seems no apparent reason, but I'm pretty sure it was a watering problem. My garden started when I moved in to my present house in 1973. There weren't too many nurseries where one could find native plants and the plant catalogs started arriving. I wound up developing obsessions to have a garden devoted to rhododendrons, so I did Rhodies for quite a few years. When they became too big I traded that obsession in for others as I moved on in succession to shrubs, grasses, roses, perennials, dwarf conifers, Rock Gardens, bamboos, Restios, Heaths and Heathers, and anything else that caught my fancy, I've almost never been attracted to native plants, though I'm happy to say I've found some I like at last, and I do have some older Manzanitas that have outgrown their spaces. Over these many years I've grown a lot of plants and I've learned a lot- and a lot of plants have wound up shovel pruned. I've quite the best garden I've ever had right now, but I can't afford to keep watering the mostly non-natives so I've been working at transitioning whereever something outgrows it's place.