Gorgeous. I want to lie down under that Zephy arch and just inhale the fragrance :D And I agree with what you've learned. All my OGRs have done well but the HT Double Delight has died three times on me so far. So this year I planted 2! LOL! Try, try again ;)

Actually. jgs, you can ask the yard if they want them back. The guy I use has samples of slabs not currently in stock but since he can order slabs on request, someone may be interested. Glad you were safe. As someone from hurricane land I can attest to #4 with great gratitude.

My mother was raised on a small farm in rural RI until, as my grandmother put it, "The bulls started getting over the fences," and they moved to the city. (You probably know what Grandma meant; it took me until I was an adult to figure out that my mother had 'blossomed'.) The HS principal in the city didn't know where to place her; she'd already finished his HS curriculum in her one-room schoolhouse. After a year, she graduated at 16 and lied to get a job. My mother worked her entire life until she was dying of leukemia at 73. She was sole support of herself and her parents through the Depression, rising to be personal secretary to the personnel director of Sheppard's Dept. Store in Providence. She married my father near the time her beloved father died of the stroke that had incapacitated him in his forties. They started a small business in Chicago that flourished during WWII -- and which exempted my father from service, although two of his brothers served. My father was unfaithful during my mother's difficult pregnancy with me. She refused to live with a mistress in her life and threw him out when I was two. She eventually agreed to sue him for divorce when I was six, hoping not to have to say in public that he was an adulterer. That was the law then, and yes, it was reported in the Chicago newspapers -- not because we were prominent, but because it was scandalous. My father would not pay the alimony or child support ordered by the court, so my mother brought her mother to live with us and care for me, and found a job. The first job at hand was saleslady in a dress shop where she sold to the ladies with whom she'd formerly golfed at the country club -- when she was not working in the company or entertaining my father's clients. Then she found office work, where, as a divorcee, her bosses considered her 'fair game'. When I was in junior high school she became a realtor and then a broker. She excelled in what was then still a man's world. Soon she was the top grossing salesperson in residential real estate for a large realty company in Chicago and the suburbs. She cared about people, and they loved and trusted her. My mother never remarried, although there were offers. An old beau continued to propose for decades. She once she came close to accepting. He was what passed for 'landed gentry' in RI, and 'close' with money. The plans foundered when she asked if she should ship her quite new washer and dryer out East, and he scoffed that his mother had used a washboard. Last straw. After she became ill, Mom heard from the lovely man who had been her first beau. Her parents had said she was too young back then. He was now a widower. He came from the East to see her and to give her the sweet diamond ring he'd bought for her so long ago. He still had a studio portrait of her and all her letters! He said he had told his wife before they married that he loved her but would never stop loving my mother. (Who says men aren't sentimental?) I had a loving mother who was also a phenomenal person who triumphed over desperate times.

Our experience has been the same as gardengal's. Mother moved from her home to a one bedroom independent living apartment. Many of her antiques, all of her jewelry. And, she'd worked several years at a jewelry store....and found those employee cost + 10% terms very hard to pass ;0) From independent to a facility that was both independent and assisted when she needed a little more help. Again, a one bed apartment. I moved her in February to a studio in a facility where she gets more attention after finding response time too slow where she was, staff too limited. It's working out perfectly. She is in a studio apartment in a wing called enhanced assisted. Not full time nursing but more attention while still giving her some independent opportunities, stimulation, activities she may choose. Her own furniture and some of her antiques. Some of her jewelry still - because she asked for it, and its hers. Nothing has ever been missing, disturbed, 'borrowed'. Her antique barristers cabinet is outside her apartment at the hallway end. It was that, or storage and I didn't want to take it away from her. It holds some of her porcelain and pincushion dolls, family photos in antique frames, some of her books. No one has touched it other than housekeeping when dusting or cleaning the glass doors. This last facility is huge, and lovely. Every level of care from just reaching the point of wanting dining room meals and housekeeping, to full memory care. I moved her in February and am still carrying a map in my purse ;0) It's on enough acres it has three postal addresses depending on which wing one is residing in. An enormous staff as you can imagine, everyone so far has been helpful and honest. I've yet to meet or hear of a light fingered neighbor.