I'll post a pic of the baboon bottom when I get back from the school run. So far only one has opened, I dont know how many there will be, so I dont know if I will have enought to share yet, but I will when I have enough. Plus I divided all my irises last year, and now they are all over the yard, I have no clue what's where. I think I bought them 3 yrs ago? Yeah, last year they didnt bloom cuz I divided..so this is their 2nd bloom for me. At the time it was just 1 plant in a pot, and no bloom yet. I did buy it just for the name, lol, how could I resist. My 2 girls are the same way. Gotta have their own lil gardening areas. The 4 yr old will plant anything, lol. She calls the seed capsules from the maple tree "tree frogs" and she planted so many last year. I had alot of black walnut seedlings pop up this year, I dont know if it was from her or the squirrels.

I am lucky to have Iris (Versicolor) growing rampantly and wild all over near our cabin. Unfortunately, in one small grove of them (about 4 plants), some ground hornets decided to make themselves at home, so I have to enjoy them from a distance. Also, they tend to bloom at varying times with some blooming in early June, and some not blooming until early July. They are truly one of my favorite flowers, and provide a nice green background for other flowers once they're done.

For those not interested in the somewhat O/T discussion of pit bulls, feel free to skip over this post. angelaid, I'm glad you reported your experience with dog bite claims made involving (or more accurately, not involving, pit bulls.) I have struggled reading through various statistics, reports, etc. that try to evaluate whether pits are inherently more aggressive than other breed types. As most all of us know, statistics typically can be manipulated to support whatever outcome is desired by the person/group funding the report. That means there are reports on both sides, some saying pits are dangerous, some saying that pits are no more dangerous than other breeds. So, you have to do some deep digging to find out what assumptions and data sets were used in arriving at the conclusions in any particular report. Some of the more recent and (I think more fairly) conducted research dispels a lot of the previously believed "truths" about pit bulls. Without going into great detail, more recent reports have identified a couple of main problems with previous reports concluding that pits are involved in more bites/attacks than other breeds by several magnitudes of order. The first problem is that previous reports included data where victims/witnesses self-identified the type of dog involved in the attack. This resulted in just about any dog with a square head and muscular body being called a "pit bull." The study presented people with a poster with photographs of 16 different dogs and asked if people could identify which of the 16 were "pit bulls." (Only 3 of the 16 were pits.) It has been a while since I read the study, but if I recall correctly, less than 10% of people could correctly identify the 3 true pit bulls on the poster. The other 90% could not only NOT correctly identify which of the dogs was a pit, but they over identified a dog as being a pit bull 75% of the time. So dogs that did not have a trace of "pit" DNA in them were being wrongly identified as pits in a vast majority of instances. Based on these misidentifications, the researchers concluded that previous claims that pit bulls were involved in 4, 5, 10 (whatever number) times the number of bites than other breeds are simply unreliable and not accurate. When researchers controlled for identification bias by looking only at bite data where DNA or a veterinarian identified a dog's breed, the number of pit bull involved bites decreased dramatically - lower than German Shepherds, Rottweilers, and even Chihuahuas. There was no longer any support for the presumption that pits were X times more likely to bite than other breeds. Finally, (as I've already gone on more than I intended to), second problem the more recent studies have dealt with is to see if of those breeds still at the top of the bite list have a genetic disposition to be more human aggressive. This has been a bit more difficult to study, but it does appear there is a correlation between owners and dog bites. Quickly, the study found that people who are drawn to own a pit, rottweiler, etc., are more likely to have a criminal history involving domestic abuse and to have more contacts with animal control regarding not properly restraining/containing the dogs in a yard. Although there is not now enough evidence to show a cause and effect, the researchers find support for the idea that dogs who are treated violently or who are left to roam the neighborhood are more likely to be involved in human bite incidents than those dogs who are not regardless of the breed.

LOL Brian and Maggy...Maggy...I am not sure. I think it must be nearing 50, but keep in mind that many are young. They will need to remain relatively small, unlike Brian's because I will not be able to get them in my house otherwise ;-). My oldest tree is about 7-8 years old and I've had him 4-5 years. Yes - they are either male or female and most have name tags with their variety and assigned name that my kids give them ;-). I even have one named after Vladimir since it's because of him mentioning the tree that I bought it. I may have to name the gold nugget after Brian...