Hi there, I am one of those professional plant people, and I deal with dracaenas a lot. I had a long chat with the wholesale greenhouse lady where I buy my plants about dracaena marginatas recently. She told me that when they are grown in Florida, they grow them under very high light with lots of fertilizer, so that they grow fast. Time is money, the faster they get the plant to full size, the sooner they can sell it and use the space to grow another one. With all of this light and water, their leaves are very firm, to the point that they can give you an extremely painful poke in the eye, like being poked with a stick (don't ask me how I know this...) A plant will keep these stiff leaves for several months after being put into its office location. If the light is very bright, the leaves will stay stiff. If the light is dim, they will gradually start to droop over time. Once they droop, I don't think they can get stiff again, at least not those particular leaves. The droopy plants that you see the plant company caring for probably only need water every two to four weeks, especially if it is dark and/or cold. I do not recommend moving marginatas into cold. They do not like cold at all, and it will lead to the lower leaves turning a mushy yellow, along with all sort of possibilities for root and stem rot. Marginatas do like to be kept dry, especially if they are in a dim location. Not as dry as a cactus, but pretty darn dry. When in doubt, err on the side of not watering. The ones you see the plant company take care of with the stiff leaves? It is quite possible that they remove them and replace them with new ones periodically, and that is why the leaves appear to stay stiff. Hope that helped!

It is ash and ash veneer. I'll go out further on a limb to say it's Asian ash. From the looks of the label, I'll guess it's no older than 25-30 years. It's their interpretation of a Queen Anne style. Casey

When I was a kid I grew up on my Grandfathers dairy farm in N.E.Ohio and although we did have tractors we did most of our farm work the old way with horse drawn equipment in the same way the Amish do today. With 45 cows, 13 draft horses, sheep, hogs, chickens and a number of young heifers coming up we had to grow over 30 acres of hard yellow dent corn to produce feed for the animals. In the spring when we were planting the corn Grandmother used to give us two or three large 3# coffee cans of squash and pumpkin seeds and as we filled the seed hoppers on the corn planter we would toss in a handful of Grandmas seeds. In the fall we cut the corn with a single row corn binder that cut the corn and tied it in bundles, which were then dropped on the ground, and we later had to stand all those bundles up into corn shocks were it stood in the field to dry until we could haul it a load or two a day to the barn to be husked. When the men were cutting the corn with the binder us boys had to run a couple rows ahead of the binder and find the pumpkins & squash, pick them and set them out in the cut part of the field so they wouldn't get run over by the binder then we had to hitch a team of horses to a box wagon and haul all the pumpkins and squash to the house and store them in the root cellar. In a typical year we would produce upwards of two tons of pumpkins and various varieties of squash, which were primarily Hubbards (which us boys affectionately called "HUBBUBS"), Acorn squash, Turbin Squash and Butternut squash and sometimes a few gourds which were used as decorations, cut into dippers or holes drilled in the sides and hung as bird houses. Needless to say, throughout the fall and winter squash was a mainstay of our diet in the same manner as potatoes and Grandmother knew dozens of different ways to cook them. For hubbards & butternut squash she primarily would cut them in half lengthwise, clean the seads out then steam or boil them, scoup the meat out of the shell, add butter and a touch of nutmeg and mash them and serve in the same manner as mashed potatoes (only no milk). If Grandmother was feeling exceptionally ambitious she would sometimes make a squash pie in the same manner as making a pumpkin pie and on rare occasions she would make an indian pudding from the squash. For the turbins and acorns she would cut them lengthwise, clean the seeds out, then place them face down on a cookie sheet with a bit of water and bake about 40 minutes in a moderate oven, then turn them right side up and put butter & honey in the cavity and bake another 15 to 20 minutes. But my abolute favorite way of fixing acorns came in late November right after we butchered hogs..Grandmother would cut acorns lengthwise, clean the seeds out, then stuff the cavity with pork sausage and bake for an hour. To this day that remains my favorite way to fix acorn squash.

Taymor lux could work, but the end plugs are flat, where gatco latitude has a more rounded end. the taymor inner ring protrudes a bit. as does the inner ring. the taymor has a bit more European/ grohe look to it. Either would work, if not directly side by side. I looked. Gatco Latitude is still available.