I was a civil service worker for some years and was on call one weekend a month for emergency clearing of streets and such from tree damage. In '79 there was a storm that went on for three weeks with Santa Ana winds in the middle. The whole crew worked 40 hrs. overtime in one weekend. We were appreciative of the home owners that came out with coffee in the middle of the night. We went to a new address at 6 in the morning and Connie Chung was standing on a down tree with her microphone. The lead man was grumpy and told her to get out of the working area. May be in her blooper file. ;^) I was thinking about this past part of my life when the fires were burning here and remember seeing D9 Cats cutting fire breaks on the news. Turns out some of the Cats were run by guys I see at the county landfill as I am a frequent visitor there for my work. I have been talking with some of my customers in the fire damaged areas about organizing a BBQ for the fire fighters and the civil service workers that helped to keep them safe. It is still in the organizational stage but hopefully will pull it off. Getting people to donate and running it through a non profit is more complicated than it may seem. hope we get enough and then some and can use extra for the people who have suffered losses.

Talking about color and the use of color in the garden is one of those things that tends to put people in defensive/hostile mode because it's difficult at times to clearly describe what exactly one means when talking about color and the use of color in the garden. So things get misinterpreted or overly simplified as each person brings their own biases and interests to interpret what was said. There is (an annoying :-) ) tendency in some quarters to dismiss color - particularly flowers - as a sort of frivolous, unimportant 'icing on the cake' element in designing a garden. That sort of dismissal of color irritates me greatly. But it also irritates me when the 'any color goes with any other' sort of line is thrown out as an oversimplification. Because the perception of a color can very much depend on what color it is partnered with. Change the partner and you change the effect. So, for me, how I use color in the garden/where I place a particular plant depends on what effect I want to create there. In my early gardening days I went through the polychrome 'anything goes' color phase but became unhappy with that because I began to see, as GP1 said above: ' "Too much color is the equivalent of no color at all". It becomes like a street lined with billboards each competing for attention and no color stands out. ' Now I try to think through what I need to do to create a desired color effect. I don't always get it right - and it can take years to gradualy change the plantings to get to where I want to go - but it has made a noticeable improvement (to me at least!) in my gardening outcomes. GP1 - as a trained artist, you (and the gardening artists in your neighbourhood) probably intuitively use color in your gardens to create desired effects whereas for plebes like me it's something that requires deliberate thought and 'misses the mark' more often! :-) Playing with color to create effects is fun - and not limited to gardening :-) Below is a picture of DH wearing a 'tumbling blocks' sweater I knit about 17 years ago. I was aiming for an 'autumn leaves' color effect. Not perfect by any means but it's still one of his favorite sweaters. The link below is to a Google image seach that shows other sweaters of the same design in different color combinations (the fifth one is DH's sweater....) so you can see how different the sweater looks depending on what colors are used and how they are combined. And that brings me to the issue of 'rules' and styles etc. 'Rule' is one of those words that also immediately gets one's back up because most of us don't particularly like the idea of being ruled! :-) Styles tend to imply a lack of originality - a 'follow the herd' sort of mentality and we all want to be thought of as individuals. But understanding what a particular 'rule' is trying to achieve, and the consequences of breaking it is useful when assessing whether it helps or hinders what you are trying to achieve. 'Rules' can be a sort of distilled 'wisdom'/short cuts that can be useful in getting you where you want to go without having to reinvent the wheel each time! Styles, in a gardening sense, are often a response to particular times, places, cultures environments, etc. Understaning why they are/were popular can be very useful in helping you decide which styles - or elements of a style - can be used or adapted to positive effect in your own garden. That's one of the reasons I like to read widely in garden history - the more I know, the clearer I see what appeals to me and how to achieve it. Certainly my interests and tastes have changed over time but change is a constant in the garden so I'm always looking for ideas that I can incorporate - harmoniously - in the garden. The constant that drives my garden is the desire for it to have a peaceful and harmonious feel while still being a vibrant space. Here is a link that might be useful: tumbling block sweaters

Jeri, Our garden is young, just started five years ago, and that's the age of our oldest Teas; the bulk are four years old or younger. Out of these five years three have been droughty (I mean drought going well beyond the normal summer dry weather), and with our no-irrigation policy the roses haven't been able to grow--or flower!--as I would have liked, though they are solidly present. 'Thank God for Tea roses' was rhetorical: we have and appreciate the Chinas, and also the once-blooming old roses and some ramblers. The David Austin roses are fussier but don't do badly in the more favored areas of the garden, and the Hybrid Musks do fine in the moister zones. I'm getting quite interested in the Damasks, reputed to do well in hot, dry weather. The situation in the Southeast sounds nasty. I think we're all going to have to learn to garden with less water. Melissa

Wow, this is so interesting!! Nice to know I am not alone :) I have had holes in the front around the belly-button area for years, and it was driving me crazy!! I kept wondering where they were coming from, and I finally noticed that the shirts were getting the holes at exactly the level of my counters which have a rough-ish tile edging. I do a lot of dishes and cooking so I figured that must be it! My kids that do dishes also get these holes (and some of us are as skinny as a rail, some are not). I also get shredded fronts on my aprons, too, so I am pretty sure it is the counters rubbing that's causing this (for us anyway!). I only noticed them once we moved to this house almost 8 years ago. I tried using a tile sander to smooth down the counter edges and I don't know if it helped much, but I thought it was worth a shot. Oh, and out of curiosity, I checked my DH's t-shirts as well, (he never does dishes!) and he has a couple holes in some very old shirts, but overall his are in good shape. Weird. Anyway, no matter what is causing this I am relieved it's not just me! :D