Not that anyone is still following this, but this was me (which.chick) and I still have Charles de Mills and he still blooms amazingly every year and I still love him. Mme. Plantier died some years back in a hard winter. I shovel-pruned Stanwell Perpetual because he just looked sad, year after year, and it was depressing. *sigh* Fantin Latour powdery mildews (it's very humid at my house) and does not bloom every year for me. Just... not doing well. I have a friend who's about 200 feet lower than me in elevation with better sun and I'm relocating Fantin there. I've waited long enough for him to settle in and it just isn't going to happen. But, Ispahan is trouble free, HUGE, and produces hundreds of flowers, every single year. (Probably would like a trellis of some sort, but doesn't have one. I have a 3' fence around the base and he sort of fountains out of that. I hack off about 6' a year before winter to keep the canes tidy.) Never sick. Never dies from freezing. Has good clean foliage ALL SUMMER. Just... big and strong grower. Two thumbs up for that. I couldn't source either of the Belles back then, but if I move Fantin Latour, I will try again this spring.

John: use the HTML tag, like this: You do that by typing without the @ symbol and by replacing the text in the quotes with, you guessed it, your image's web adress. This is NOT the address of the website the image appears on, but the location of the image itself. It will probably end in .jpg or .png or .gif but will NOT end in .com or .net or .org any of those. Follow the instructions on this website to get the image's web adress. For example, the address for the image above is http://www.logees.com/images/C2009-citrus-myrtifolia.jpg I'm not sure why Gardenweb makes users learn HTML. It can take a while to learn for people who aren't already computer-savvy.

Hi Satine, As Popeye in the comics used to say ... "I am ... what I am". It seems rather too bad that we are so fixated on youth ... and all of the models showing off stuff are not only young ... but as beautiful as all get out, as well. The clinic where they were giving me the ultra-sound to guide the needle to shrink my varicose veins are fairly strongly (addicted?) to helping (mainly) women go through a number of procedures to not show their age. Hey, gals - I got news for ya! That's a losing proposition! Trying to keep that wolf from the door is a bet that one can't win! On the other hand ... when Sue's Mom came to visit us in Korea when Sue was about 25, the Korean women couldn't believe how good she, a teacher, probably about 50, looked: they figured that she looked more like Sue's sister. In Korea most women over their 30s looked rather old, as life was rather a tough game for most of them. While I don't advocate letting ourselves go, at the same time I think that it's rather important for us to grow old with as much grace as we can, but without using drastic measures in the attempt to block the aging. Back in 1939 when World War II started and the English elected rather a bulldog called Churchill to be Prime Minister, he began the idea of putting up one's index and middle finger in a "V", to affirm that we were aiming at "Victory" in the war. In more recent years, maybe beginning in the 60s, many of the out-of-the-rut folks, mainly young people, used that symbol to affirm that they yearned for "Peace". It seems to me that "Peace", like a "Peach" doesn't appear out of thin air. If we don't have roots and trunks plus branches, leaves ... and flowers ... we don't get peaches. If we don't have roots and trunks of justice, and branches and leaves of compassion, with some love for blossoms ... ... we ain't a gonna get peace: it doesn't appear out of thin air, either. We need an increasing level of fairness in the ways in which the reources of the world are distributed, as well, I think, for as we proceed down the road of increasing disparities of income and wealth, in almost all cases they have found in history that such situations result in revolution, when the disadvantaged people become hungry and desparate enough. It was only a few centuries ago that the population of the world was one billion ... then in rather short order, from the historians' point of view, two billion ... ... and now we're well over six billion, going on 7. Arable land is finite ... and tends to deteriorate ... plus, as warming takes place, some of the deserts, including the Sahara, are expanding. If your forebears for centuries have been herdsmen, following their cattle as they migrated seeking pasture ... when the dry weather stunts or kills the grass, then your cattle die ... what can you do then? We've fished a large portion of many of the traditionally edible fish out of the sea, so now, after re-naming some of them, are eating fish that our forebears would have turned up their noses at the suggestion that they eat them. The amount of petroleum that had been used prior to a hundred years ago, you could have stuck in your eye ... and, while it took millions of years to produce it ... we've been profligate in the ways that we've used it. Do you think that possibly our grandkids may choose to hate us for having spoiled ourselves so thoroughly? ole joyful

We moved into a neighborhood of 1960s-70s colonials. One of the many things I liked about our house was the black slate foyer floor. A new friend came by and mentioned that "that slate is really easy to remove" and she had just put new large-format tile in her foyer instead. 12 years later and I still prefer my black slate. The other thing I wouldn't and won't change is the kitchen curtains. The kitchen faces the street and includes a breakfast nook, so we need some curtains, but I don't want to block the view altogether. The house came with cafe curtains, as well as an upper tier of curtains (not a valance) for the larger breakfast nook windows. They are somewhat sheer, maybe translucent is the word, which I like: it's like looking through lightly-frosted glass so I can see if someone is walking by the house without really being able to see who they are. The little ruffle probably dates them the most, but given that they are otherwise plain it's cute. What I'd really like is a toile pattern, but I just can't find a fabric that is translucent, without being "shiny".