Barb, There are all kinds of laws about shipping plant material around both inside and outside the country. They vary not only from country to country but also from state to state inside the US. There should be a British consulate or trade mission somewhere near you in California. They would be able to provide the most accurate advise about sending your seeds to the UK. The careless, accidental and in some cases even purposeful spread of exotics has been a plague on all our houses!

If you're in the Denver Metro area, Dirichmond, Kelly at Timberline Gardens on West 58th in Arvada carries most of the same plants that were sold by High Country--and more. Kelly is VERY into native and xeric plants and grows things you won't find anywhere else in the Denver area--but no mail order! I checked his site and his perennial list for 2012 has been taken down and the new one for 2013 isn't up yet--he must be working on it! In addition to Timberline he has his own private business, Cold Hardy Cactus, where he sells a LARGE selection of hardy cacti plus some really cool agaves, some yuccas and a few other miscellaneous things. And he DOES mail order those, so if you're interested in any of that I recommend you check out his site, linked below. (There's also a direct link to Timberline on his Cactus Home Page!) And if you ARE in the Metro area and are interested in cacti, you can see a LOT of them blooming at Timberline, usually in June, but the extreme heat last year had them all messed up and they bloomed way early! Don't know of any other mail order places that would be similar to High Country. Skybird Here is a link that might be useful: Cold Hardy Cactus (dot com)

Hey, thanks Carrie. You are so right about nature. We often just overlook a lot of what she has to offer. I think that is what I like most about taking pics. If you just slow down and look around, you can find something beautiful... even a great little flower pretty much surrounded by piles of cow chips. ;) Beauty is where you find it, but you have to be willing to look. Kind of like that old saying, you may have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. You may have to dance around a lot of "stuff" to get a nice pic. haha.

Nadine--I think those slide out hoods are going to require a lot of the space in the cabinet above so you're going to lose that space anyway. So you might want to consider a more conventional undercabinet hood, too. Depending on your situation, you may be able to vent directly out the back of hood into your existing vent and not lose any of the cabinet space. It won't be quite as accessible though as you realize. I'm assuming that your rectangular vent is 3.25 x 10" which is roughly equivalent to a six inch round duct. So you need to look at hoods with CFM's sized for that size of duct. Unless you know exactly how your vent is situated, you need to remove the microwave. A lot of hoods will be adaptable to horizontal rectangular, vertical rectangular vent and vertical round exhaust. I know that my Zephyr hood had all three options. Zephyr Typhoon I disagree that you will get 'tremendous' noise. Not going to be whisper quiet but will most likely be substantially less noisy than most micro hoods. Here is a link that might be useful: Slide out range hood