You said you 'rigged up your own tower'... what did you use? It's certainly an interesting effect! We don't have any water features here, largely because this is a West Nile Virus area and we have lots of mosquitoes in the woodland garden, so I don't want to provide any more habitat for them :-) I don't have any annuals in the garden - except for veggies in pots on the driveway :-) I used to grow Blue Wave petunias for pots by the front steps - they have a wonderful spicy scent in morning and evening. But it wasn't worth setting up the grow lights just for them and I can't seem to find them anymore in garden centers around here, so I just gave up on them and now have Sum and Substance hostas in the pots by the steps. I think you may be underestimating what tour visitors want... An interesting garden is the main thing I think and many are interested in seeing a more varied and 'complicated' garden than they would ever contemplate growing themselves! Talking to other visitors to the garden on the local tour here this year, that was one of the main complaints - i.e. 'this isn't interesting; I grow all this stuff myself...' or words to that effect :-) The other main complaint was that the owner/gardener was only present and available to talk to in one garden. (And we mainly talked about dogs with them - their dog was a theraphy dog and we volunteer at the local training facility for service dogs (guide dogs for the blind; hearing ear dogs for the deaf; assistance dogs for the physically disabled; seizure response dogs; autism companion dogs - all very interesting.) So the dog issues were more interesting than the garden ones there! Have fun next weekend - I hope the weather is nice, but not too hot!

Nature in east N America is tougher in tooth & nail than the forested areas of the NA west (and west Europe). Some major reasons: 1. Continental climate -- extreme/rapid temp changes. Trunk-bark cracking on the south side killed three ~80' Norway maples at my house from the bitter-cold 76/77 and 77/78 winters. The fourth one that had shade on its trunk from a garage had no problem. 2. Spring/summer violent thunderstorm winds -- especially bad on lush, fully-leafed hardwoods. 3. Wet snow/ice-storms -- more common in E NA. Total snow amounts aren't directly important -- the stickiness is (then the amounts are important). 4. Hurricanes & tropical storms in late summer/autumn. Sandy-storm... 5. Summer high-humidity & associated fungi & bacteria. 6. Winds. Not that the west has slower winds, but larger & more extensive mountains provide more potential shelter. Coastal redwoods get tallest behind shelter of the coastal ranges. The tallest east-coast forests are in sheltered coves of the Smokies. 7. Lightning. Certainly in the US southeast and southern plains, but even in western MD, prb'ly my favorite tree growing up, a 90' Nordmann fir, was mostly (except for one branch) done in by a direct strike. The northwest-exposed sycamore on my lot at 115' is hardly gaining height any more. Not that it doesn't try, but invariably the strongest Tstorm of the summer shreds leaves/new sprouts off the top. But it's spreading out & thickening at a good rate. Where I grew up, a nearby open-grown 350 yr old white oak (8 ft dia) was a mere 90' tall, but over 100' wide. There was no branch damage at the top, just the growth slowing to a crawl there. The lesson for a tree seems to be, if you want to live centuries in eastern NA, keep a relatively low but wide profile, and have trunk-bark thick enough to insulate against freeze-thaw cracking... Prb'ly a dozen of the 100'+ white pines that grow above the canopy have been broken/uprooted & vanquished just downwind of me on the lower slopes in 9 yrs. They need physical shelter and/or a dense, self-protecting "grove", like the original PA stands, to get taller. This prb'ly goes for any tall canopy trees here. I noticed Spruceman's Norway spruce & hemlock stands looked quite dense & got hammered, but that just shows localized extreme events can damage or even destroy any stand no matter what. The 1994 ice-storm in VA caused a whole nearby east-facing slope (at least 30 acres) of mostly 100'+ tuliptrees to uproot. It must have been like dominoes -- the highest-slope trees sagging downslope against their neighbors, finally giving way, then w/the added weight, those trees uprooting, etc, etc, down to the bottom. A sight of carnage just a mile downslope of me. That ice-storm produced four inches of liquid-equivalent sticking to surfaces. 4" liquid is equivalent in weight to ~40" snow -- but all of it sticking.

Around ponds, lakes or shallows in other waterways they like horsetail grasses, cattails and plants that attract mosquitoes and flies and plants that grow in the shallows of water. However, they will use any flower or plant in the garden to attract mates. After mating, the male drags the female to a pond or shallows of some kind of waterway where she will lay her eggs. He protects his mate from harm by keeping the grip he had of her head while mating while she dips her tail into the water depositing 100s of milky looking eggs. The eggs are about the size of a grain of sand. As the eggs develop they will change color turning brown and getting darker. They will lay there on the bottom in the murky water all winter and in spring the nymphs will hatch out and crawl around on the bottom eating debris off the bottom. When the time is right in summer, they crawl the stems of water plants to dry out, their old skin cracking open and emerging as a young dragonfly. It will hang on to that plant allowing its wings to dry and then take off flying about your yard searching for insects to eat and searching for a mate. The whole process takes a year. It is quite a remarkable thing to observe. You can probably find more detailed, scientific info on the internet, but this is what I have observed in and around my yard and my Koi pond. My yard is filled with them right now flittering about from flower to flower and plant to plant like butterflies, hunting and courting. A very amazing insect! They swoop down over the lawn scooping up mosquitoes and other insects and bugs. Interesting to watch them perch on a twig and munch down on their prey. They aren't called "mosquito hawks" for nothing! ~sweetannie4u

Pat, We have them in all different colors here, though mostly browns, greens and blues. In a wet year we have billions of them, and in a dry year merely millions. Seriously, we aways have a lot because we have 5 ponds, 3 creeks, a swamp and at least 3 different areas where springs come bubbling up out of the ground. At the present time, though, only the lilypond has water in it, but only because we add water weekly with the water hose. Everything else is as dry as a bone. I always have them around the garden and yard, even in the worst of droughts. We have bats here most years, but I don't think we've seen any at all this year. We don't have a bathouse, but leave very tall snags (standing dead trees) in the woods for them. It could be that they are out there in the evenings, and we aren't seeing them because it is too hot to sit outside in the lawnchairs and watch them like we usually do. We're not seeing as many barn swallows either, so it may be the insect population (excluding spider mites and grasshoppers) is lower than usual so it cannot support a large predator population. Dawn