Hard to figure them there squashes sometimes. I just plant a good number and in succession and don't worry about them much......

Over here in Dallas, coldest winter in 30 years. It looks like my st augustine suffered a bit more winter kill than usual but as long as there are green stolons, I'll be fine. It may be a slow recovery for the next month. Every day, green blades are slowly poking through dead grass.

This is my second major garden, and I learned a lot of the basics with the first one. I didn't have the forum with my first garden, but I did have my horticulturalist sister, a keen gardener herself, who gave me lots of information, encouragement, and plants. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of either of my gardens; words will have to do. Things I learned: My first garden was in the Pacific Northwest, and I learned to love the old once-flowering roses there. At first I wanted repeat-blooming roses, but the more once-bloomers I grew, the more of them I wanted. They don't work everywhere, but in the PNW they're fabulous. I have and love them here as well, but they come into flower right when it's getting really hot, and so aren't as well suited to local conditions as in Washington. So the other thing I've learned is to grow roses suited to your local conditions. I'm gradually allowing Bourbons into my garden here: they did poorly in my first garden because they didn't have summer heat, while here they're great. I learned to plan for succession of bloom, rather than roses that bloom all year long (this is still a characteristic of temperate climates): here this means, more or less, spring bulbs, lilacs, tall bearded iris, peonies and roses, clematis, lavender and buddleia, dahlias, roses again. I found out that roses are drought tolerant plants that can happily go weeks without water; in fact, I found out that a lot of plants are more drought tolerant than I had supposed. Western Washington and the Italian foothills are both dry in summer. A lot of my mistakes in my first garden involved not siting plants correctly: not exploiting walls for warmth; putting shade plants in shade, sun plants in sun. For some reason, right from the beginning I gardened organically and didn't use the various poisons available to help the gardener; and I also believed in mulch and soil improvement from the start. I've never seen any reason to change this approach. I started gardening as a non-pruner, and have slowly learned how to prune as I went along. I think this is the healthiest path of development. As Henry Mitchell said, often the best thing the gardener can do is nothing. My gardening philosophy is minimalist: I do only what I think is necessary, always working toward a garden that will be relatively self-sustaining (I still have an enormous amount of labor, don't worry!). My sister introduced me to the writings of Henry Mitchell, among other things, so I read about garden design and plant selection from the start. I think this helped me avoid a lot of mistakes I might otherwise have made. I've learned here in Italy to be very wary of doing anything that might provoke a landslide. About roses, I've learned to look at the whole plant rather than at the flowers, and to take size estimates with plenty of salt. It's really hard to get an idea of what a rose is like without seeing a well-grown specimen at first hand. This is also quite terribly true of flower colors: photographs are untrustworthy. Melissa

I've been having trouble getting into "my next book." I checked four books out of the library the other day and rejected them one-by-one after reading just a few pages of each. Last night I scanned my own bookshelves and selected A Patchwork Planet thinking, "Maybe Anne Tyler can get me out of my funk." As I started reading, the book seemed vaguely familiar and yet I had no idea what was coming next. This morning, I checked my book journal to see if I'd read it before. I had to laugh at what I had written: I was disappointed in this book. While entertaining, it's pretty forgettable. Forgettable indeed!