Maureen: Even though I answered this question in one of your previous postings, I will - again - put in my highest recommendation for A & D Nursery, whose link I have listed below. The quality of their rootstock was mentioned in my response to that posting. As you may not know, I am a Librarian with the Michigan Dept. of Corrections. Our facility has an active horticultural program for the inmates. Since none of the garden areas had any peonies gracing the soil, I purchased 4 peonies last year in the spring - 2 each of "Sarah Bernhardt" and 2 each of "Felix Crousse" - at the local Wal-Mart. Although they were considerably cheaper, the roots of those Peony roots were much less than one-fourth of the roots that I just purchased from A & D Nursery. Despite the good efforts of the inmate gardeners - only two or perhaps one of the Peony roots has survived and even now one of the surviving roots still looks on the puny side - as only one or two sets of small leaves are showing and they are not much more than four or five inches high. I suspect that it will survive our southern Michigan winter, but I also suspect that it will take either four or five years for this plant to come into mature bloom. So if you're prone to make use of less expensive Peony rootstock, I would be absolutely certain to deeply and well prepare the soil down to a minimum of 18 inches or deeper and, at least, the same distance in diameter and greatly improve the soil structure, if needed. If you find yourself working with a clayish soil, I would also recommend working with a good soil auger to make soil preparation far easier. With this tool, once you have substantially loosened the soil, all you have to do is to remove the loose dirt. Obviously, less back breaking work. I recently purchased the Pro Gardening Auger System from the folks at the web address below, which should make good deep soil preparation for a host of bulb, plant, and rootstock material far, far easier. IMHO this system is the best soil auger around for the money, durability, and versatility. http://www.neatitems.com/Dirt_Daug.htm Hope this information is more than useful. Bill Here is a link that might be useful: A & D Nursery

Thanks all for the suggestions. I found something on yayagal's link, but at $13 each, that's still more than I'd like to spend. I think I'm interested in purchasing 10, but if that's what I'll need to pay, maybe I'll reconsider and buy only 6 and use them for only smaller groups. I've looked at Pier One, World Market and Target and again not the right color and more than I want to spend. Don't have Garden Ridge nearby and am not sure about Old Time Pottery. Deb, I looked at Michael's and the only wooden plate was a smaller, salad size and it was over $10. I'll try Hobby Lobby, if I'm near one. In the meantime, I've purchased another tablecloth to use. Perhaps when I stop looking, that's when I'll find something.

Hi Nutmegxo. I see why you're attracted to those last pictures. The fresh colors & nice workmanship make those rooms seem very attractive. However, you say that your house is a center hall Colonial, and those wall treatments derive from Mission and Arts & Crafts style house of the early 1900s, where the whole idea was to create a completely different--a more modern--feel than the Colonial houses of the century before. Oh, sure, you can mix styles all up--people do it all the time--but while a mix of different furniture styles in a single house can work out just fine, a mix of architectural feaures cobbled together from different styles in different centuries isn't often a success, especially when, as in a center hall plan, each room is clearly visible from the other. Normal size doorways with doors that close allow you to sneak the odd painted room into a house full of stained wood, or add an Art Deco bathroom to a Tudor manse, but the typical broad doorways in Colonial Revival houses make using different architectural styles in adjacent rooms a dicier proposition. That's the thinking behind some of the posters' suggestion above. Let's take a closer look at that blue room you posted. Pretty colors, that's for sure. But there are a few things that show somebody missed the bus. One of the things that bothers me is that the door looks like a generic six-panel door out of the Big Box store. These days, six-panel doors are as ubiquitous as were hollow-core slab doors when I was growing up in the 196Os, and like those doors, these are often used where they don't belong. A six-panel door in a modern house or contemporary condo is every bit as out-of-place as a slab door in a Federal style house, and just because they're easy to find (and some people see them as 'nicer' than cheap hollow core doors) doesn't make them suitable. Even if we assume that whever combined a door style from 1760 with a wall treatment from 1900 knew exactly what they were doing--and I'm not at all sure that's the case--they still missed an opportunity to do it well. Look at the door's cross-member. Now look at the upper horizontal on the wall. How hard would it have been to raise that wall molding four inches so it would align with the lines of the door? Or, if instead of painting the door all white, they really wanted to feature the [mismatched] door, why didn't they space the wall's moldings to match the panels on the door? Doing that could have allowed the blue to flow unbroken across the door's lower panels, better integrating the door into the overall look of the room. But instead of going to the hassle of finding a more approriate period-style door--either a five-panel model with stacked horizontals, or a three-panel model with one square panel above two vertical panels--or, if this wall treatment is new, adjusting it to match the door's proportions, they just took the easy no-thought middle course, buying & hanging a generic door with little thought given to how to better relate it to the other features in the room. Those kind of details are the things that, thought about early enough in the process, can make a a huge difference in the final results, and they often cost no more than doing things the same way everybody else does them and coming up with the same predictable results. Good design isn't about money, it's about thinking. But these days, all it takes is a pretty coat of paint to make a lot of people think a room is well-designed. M.

Vintage silverplate platters just a bit larger than dinnerplates are remarkably inexpensive, given the rising price of silver and gold. Look at Goodwill, estate sales, garage sales. My generation (married late 60s early 70s) got this stuff for wedding presents, often because our cheap relatives got them at the bank when they made a savings deposit! The brides didn't want to keep them tarnish free so they put them away and now they're downsizing and their kids don't want to polish them either. I have two of them in a box destined for the Goodwill right now.