How about setting the swans down on a big piece of old mirror? I have some smaller ones that I have sitting on an old silver tray that has mirror glued to the bottom of it. You could make a big piece of mirror look like a pond if you decorated around the edge with rocks & plants etc. I love the look of the swan reflections in the mirror! Betty

Pittosporum tobira won't work. It likes shade to partial shade and will burn in full sun/reflected heat. It is also not considered desert-adapted due to their high water needs. Keep in mind the mature size of whatever you plant. A tree that has a mature width of 10 feet should be planted 5 feet away from your wall. Here are my sugggestions: Palo Blanco (Acacia williardiana) 20 feet tall x 10 feet wide, graceful branches with white trunk Mexican Bird of Paradise (Caesalpinia mexicana) 10 x 8, evergreen with yellow flowers nearly year round Texas Olive (Cordia boissieri) 10 x 10, evergreen with crisp white flowers spring to fall Hop Bush (Dodonaea viscosa) 10 x 8, evergreen, low litter Orange Bells (Tecoma hybrid) 8 x 5, tubular orange flowers Yellow Bells (Tecoma stans v stans) 8 x 5, tubular yellow flowers You can view these and more on line at the link below. Here is a link that might be useful: Landscape Plants for the Arizona Desert

Hey, Mikki, congratulations! I am betting you won't be disappointed. I'm a vet (sower, that is), having done this for nine years now, and just moved to a new home June of 2010 in northern AL after 14 years in Gardenweed's area. I have an amazing number of wintersown plants established now already, with plans to do a lot more this year. As far as organization goes: I used to keep a spreadsheet with name, botanical name, container # (I still # my containers - I have a lot, and it helps me to cross-check easily), date sown, date germinated, date transplanted, source (gathered, trade or commercial), year packed/gathered, whether or not there were seeds left over, height and color information. It got to be too much for me, so now I just keep a notebook I hand write in: date sown, container #, botanical or common name, source & year, seeds left?, germination date?, transplant date. Much easier for me. Organizing seeds, and I have a LOT (thousands): I separate into 3 large categories - commercial, trade, gathered. Gathered, which is the smallest, gets separated by year gathered, then alphabetized. The other two, which have tons of seeds, get separated into type (annual, perennial, vegetable, herb) and year. Trade seeds then go into the emptied small boxes that held the coin envelopes I use to pack my own trades, marked with year and type. Commercial seeds get alphabetized and held together with a rubber band. The whole shebang gets stored in two rather large plastic containers (potentially 3 this coming year....)to stay cool & dry. For the most part, this insures that I can find a particular variety from my 60-something page "Seeds I Have" list easily. I recommend having less seeds, but I am a full-fledged member of SA (Seedaholics Anonymous). Most important is to have fun - you will develop your own style, more or less different from everyone else's, as you go. Nope, not dancing nekkid on Solstice - don't much like the cold! :)

Also people need to know more about the geography and climate conditions of where the plants orginate. I grow peonies and for years I have been telling people to plant in light shade vs. the full sun that "experts' state is needed. Now that there has been more trips to where many of the peonies have originated and looking at the pictures many are in forest,short tree plains, or even tucking themselves under bushes. Recomendations for some plants are changing. I have for a long time wanted to do away with zones because they only reflect temperature ranges and not real growth situations. I am a person that believes the climate is changing, to what I am not certain, but too many people are trying to maintain as is and not realizing how they garden may not be best for the area as it is now. Perhaps for the ones like myself Gardenweb could start a new forum for gardening changes so people could tell of the changes they see and what they are doing to cope.