Quelle surprise: to see this old post back up on page one! It is also a bit serendipitous to see it on this particular day. My DW and I are putting the old house up for sale, sign goes up today. She is 112 years old and we have spent the past 13 years renovating and loving her. But when we moved to the East all those years ago, the plan was always to move back west to our home Province of British Columbia. That is where all of both are families are, so the time has come to go home. It is a bitter sweat time in our lives. Leaving our grand old home, my zone pushing garden and dear friends we have made here in Ontario. I am also very maudlin about all the roses I grow which will most likely perish without my fanatic care and winter protection. But that is life. I will not miss having to go to all the work of winter protection and spring cleanup growing tender roses here requires. I look forward to growing roses in a warmer climate again, but his well be the third garden I will have to build from scratch. Thanks for bringing the post up again jjpeace. Paula, I expect we will soon share more similar gardening climates. We will likely end up in the South Okanagan of British Columbia, an arid zone 7. Cheers, Rick

I'm so glad you're all scheduled and ready for surgery, Cindee! By the time autumn rolls around, you and Lizalily should both be in wonderful shape... and all ready for Hippi Season! I think we should rename that season... the Christmas Holidays should be known as the Hippi Holidays! This year seems to have been very long, indeed, for many of the hippi growers here on the forum! I'm glad the flowers could be enjoyed for such an extended period! They've all been incredibly beautiful! I look forward to another season of bulb buying, and watching the flowers emerge and bloom! I'd better get my wish list out and think about which varieties I really want to get! We've had such a wet spring so far that I haven't even had to drag out the soaker hoses and lay them throughout the beds! Yesterday alone, we got over 3 inches of rain... and the forecast looks cloudy and wet for the next few days, as well! I'm off to see how the gardens fared through the latest of thunderstorms... I'm taking the camera with me, so I'm sure there'll be new photos to post very soon, as time and work permit! I'm also happy to report that my hippi seeds are beginning to sprout, as are my other flats of perennial seeds! I should have plenty of hippi seedlings, and I hope they grow well over the summer, before it's time to bring them in... Have a great day, everyone!

This is a new reply to an old post, but there are native live oaks in the area roughly between Ft. Worth, Abilene, and Wichita Falls, Texas that should work beautifully in your area. For some reason, nobody has developed commercial cultivars from this area. Live oaks, especially along the northern margin of their range, can vary in their characteristics. The ideal would be one with dense foliage that stays dark green all winter on a non-stoloniferous tree that branches With strong crotch angles. For commercial growers, it would probably require two trips to western North Texas—one in February/March to identify trees with the right characteristics, and once again in September/October to collect acorns. Maybe ten years of field trials would be in order after that. Of course this would be more of a long-range project than collecting an annual or perennial, but it could fundamentally change the landscape in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Eastern Seaboard up to Philadelphia or maybe New York.

susieliz -- I don't know about the others, but my desire to refinish doesn't have anything to do with scratches or day-to-day wear and tear on the counters. They are holding up beautifully to anything I put them through (and I have one of the softer varieties). The few nicks and scratches I've gotten in the two years since mine has been installed don't bother me in the least. In my case, I dealt with fabricators that didn't have a whole lot of experience with soapstone. My guess is the slabs were sanded with too high of a grit and so are shiny rather than the wonderful soft matte appearance that they should have. Also, the fabricators did not tint the seam epoxy to match the soapstone, so I have a light gray line running through my darker counters. I could live happily with my counters just as they are, but I'm just jumping at the opportunity to have them refined by someone who actually specializes in soapstone. If you do a search and look at pluckymama's before and afters (done by Joshua), you'll see what I'm hoping to achieve. Don't fear soapstone. I think almost everyone who gets it loves it. I certainly do.