My wife has a beautiful garden with all kinds of lilies and hosta and many other types of flowers which I have no idea. She wins contests for our yard and we've spent a lot of money with irrigation, truckloads of mulch delivered by semi, trips far and wide to various garden stores to buy the elusive flowers... I say all that to make the point that our yard is her passion and she loves to garden. A couple years ago she went on a vacation with a girlfriend for a week or so. She left me in charge (mistake #1). I was given strict instructions on running the irrigation (we hadn't yet installed our final leg of irrigation that summer and it was hot and dry). Oh, and we have a real deer problem - they will eat her garden down to the ground if we don't spray the garden at least once a week with some "deer-away" stuff that smells like two month old horse urine. Soooo... she gave me instructions to spray all the flowers with the nasty urine smelling stuff she had kindly pre-mixed for me in the hand-pumped sprayer in the garage. Well I did my duties just as instructed, watered, and on the allotted day spent probably 30 minutes spraying the deer repellant onto all the flower beds. When I was done I brought the sprayer back into the garage and suddenly realized I hadn't smelled that horrible smell as I was spraying all the flowers. I then noticed that there were TWO sprayers in the garage. Hmm, i thought. I opened up the second one and PHEW what a smell - well that one is clearly deer repellant. So what I had I just sprayed all over the entire garden? Yes, you guessed it. Round-up. Oh my goodness. Panic set in. I ran out with a hose, but then thought, what if that makes it worse. I feverishly called the manufacturer and tried to get information on what I could do - the guy laughed and said pretty much I was screwed; once it was on the leaves there was nothing I could do. I went out and sprayed and sprayed anyway for hours. Ran the sprinkler for I think 2-3 days continuously. Wife came home. I said nothing. Flowers started looking bad in spots. Then worse. Eventually I had to fess up. And then I went out with a HUGE black permanent marker and LABELED the sprayers. Thankfully after her initial anger, she forgave me. And I wrote many checks that summer to replace flowers.

Thanks, Maire Cate. I did enjoy it, although that seemed unlikely by the time I had the car packed with food and wine to bring to the event. It was SO hot yesterday, hazy and extremely humid--difficult conditions for making any kind of physical effort. Then when I arrived and started setting things up things got off to an . . . unusual start. Using a corkscrew to open a bottle of red wine, I managed to break the cork, leaving about a quarter of it in the bottle. I decided to push it through, into the bottle. (I've since learned this is something people try only once.) When I did, the wine sprayed up like a fountain, covering me and the table with droplets of red. It was in my hair, and worse than that, it was all over my pure white linen top. I grabbed napkins and started blotting. I think I was mumbling, "This didn't happen . . . this didn't happen . . . " Amazingly, the little red spots blotted up nicely, so that they weren't noticeable unless I pointed them out. (Which I didn't do except with my daughter and my best friend.) As I'd hoped, adrenalin carried me through. As long as I was "on," with people to talk to, I felt fine. I drank water and nibbled on pretzel sticks. I haven't counted up the number of people yet, but I know we had at least 30. Almost all were my friends, so that gave it a nice party atmosphere. I didn't take a single picture, but I'm meeting my granddaughter there this afternoon and will snap some photos then. She couldn't come yesterday because she had to work. I was happy to see my daughter arrive, though. I was afraid she wouldn't be able to make it because she was stuck at O'Hare (with no A/C) much of the night before. But she got there, and stayed till the end to help me clean up. As for sales.........ha! Just one of the smaller ones was sold. I wasn't expecting any sales, so I wasn't disappointed. I woke up in a sweat again last night. I sure hope this isn't an indication that the fever was back. I especially hope this because I exchanged a lot of hugs and kisses last night. Most people knew I'd been sick, but figured I'd recovered, I guess. And, for those few hours, so did I. :-)

Jay I would dying to know what Chilean trees are surviving for them in TN and AL. I have tried pretty much all the various Eucryphias from PNW nurseries over the years. They either die in the summer, or if they for some reason make it through a summer, they die in winter. But as I've seen with ungrafted 'Nancy Evans', the reason they aren't making thru winter is PRIMARILY simply aren't growing enough in the summer. Cause I'm talking even pretty mild winters. Alas, with a weirdo southern hemisphere plant like this, there's no heat resistant rootstock to graft it onto! Grafted 'Nancy Evans' SEEMS much hardier than ungrafted simply because it is growing a strong root system during the summer! However as I learnt with Chusqueas it pays to keep trying. C. culeou and and I think I tried a C. andina at some point, decline pretty rapidly in summer here. I suppose because of its broader native range, C. gigantea had no problems with hot humid summers and continued to grow through them. It was also at least as winter hardy as my poor old Thamnocalamus tessellatus, that has gotten pretty big during strings of mild winters only to be cut down during cold years. Alas, the damn things flowered in 2020! Just as it was getting established! I didn't bother collecting seed because I worried about getting quality plants with such a narrow gene pool. Hopefully Ian at Desert Northwest offers it soon from fresh seed. (all bamboos of a species flower in the same year in case anyone doesn't know this) Floral - 95/96 had been a very cold winter in Scotland although the owner of a large UK nursery told me it wasn't in the south, so you might not remember it as such. Supposedly got down to the mid single digits F...around -15C. Anyhow, the Eucryphia X nymansensis 'Nymansay' in that picture was a little big singed on its northern flank but it didn't stop it from blooming profusely. It was probably 1/2 as big then. But it looked much better than the Cordylines. All of them in town were burnt down to the lowest 3' of trunk if not the ground. Same at the presumably slightly milder St. Andrews. OTOH I saw big undamaged cordies at Culzean Castle on the milder west coast of Scotland. The nice thing about this view is because this is a major thoroughfare of Edinburgh you can see the street views all the way back to 2008, and witness the slow but steady expansion of the tree. My bedroom was the room in the leftmost of the 4 buildings, above the blue door. Check out August 2019: THANKS FOR PLAYING!

Carolyn, did you ever consider becoming a teacher? Are there other teachers in your family? Students having had such a fine example like your mother as a teacher, she most likely inspired some of them (inside or outside the classroom) to follow in her footsteps. Anyone: Which was the pivotal year in your schooling when you had some inkling of what your ambitions might be? Carolyn's daughter was four years old when she decided she wanted to be a nurse. That's early, I think! I've heard and read that nine, ten, and eleven years of age are prime years for the coalescing of which 'track' a child will follow. My English friends say it was definitely eleven for them because of the 11-plus exams (which I understand changed after their time for many pupils). I'm not so sure about in the U.S. But many people mention the fourth grade (ages 9 and 10) as being the year when the most new subjects were introduced (e.g., the first year of 'real' science; arithmetic became mathematics; health was treated formally; and we tried out various electives such as drama, 'ready writing' or photography). I remember it being a very busy year, but I don't think I formed any aspirations at that time. Possibly I was a late bloomer in that respect. Rosefolly, you are too hard on yourself, in my opinion. <grin> Everyone makes grammatical errors. Even the expert grammarians can't agree on many of the finer points. They love to argue, and their debates are often very entertaining, as well as enlightening.