Thanks to all of you for the nice comments! Kerry, as far as I know, Aech Sangria is a select clone of of fasciata var purpurea. And the Sangria a-m is still not a very 'stable' variegated plant - thus the almost albino pup that I got. But your one that you just got, looks very close to being 'settled'! I find all the Sangrias - plain or variegated - do best with a little bit of direct sun and then bright light for the rest of the day, to ring out their best colour. And apparently you also get better colour if you feed them a bit. I hit mine about once a months with a half strength foliar feed - low nitrogyn and high potash. Japie

Kankakee River report: No ice sheet above the Wilmington IL dam. Last winter the slow flowing sheet was breaking over the dam almost 6" thick. Below the dam not even edge ice. Mallard Ducks, Canada Geese and Mute Swans love the available seaweed along the shores. 3 days ago Bald Eagle caught a nice fish and ate it on a high branch across the river. Folks who have summer homes down river at the Interstate 55 bridge so far have not flooded like they had the past 3 years due to lake effect snow melt in NW IN and NE IL. No annual open air ice hockey tournement this year. No ice on scheduled January day OR on the rescheduled day in Feb. Not even open skating. I have only had snow cover maybe 5 nights this winter. I too worry about too early breaking dormancy. But the hostas always survive. WGN weather (Tom Skilling) reports the hottest winter in 56 years in Chicago. So it has been this warm B4. Only a cycle? Les

YIKES! I guess I jumped winter. My roses are also trying to bloom but the cold nights have stunted their progress. There's new growth but many canes are now pretty bare. Can't say they're lush, just seems like the last ditch effort. It's been going down to the 30's at night with frost. No snow. The first time I viewed this house last December, it was on the coldest day they had last winter, some 15 below zero in the sun. Scared me silly seeing my dog unable to walk on the snow, it was so cold. I thought it was salt but just subzero cold snow. He's a Lab and usually lounges comfortably in snow! So I guess I'm a bit paranoid! I moved here in April and can't say I know the seasons yet. I'm north of Binghamton, south of Whitney Point and backed by a hay field which lets the wind really roar. All my plants are babies, planted this summer. Not exactly established but they all grew and seem to be flourishing. I do want to give them a chance to get through the cold, even if it's a bit over the top this first winter. Plus, a good start as spring and summer seemed a bit slow to muster this year. Today, I began mounding soil (12" at the base), tying up, caging and mulching my roses. I have 4 done, 3 are tied and mounded and 2 are still loose with a bit of extra soil dumped on the bases. But if Thanksgiving is the correct time, should I free them until the end of November? I plan on treating the roses as described, plus a similar mound, mulch and probably cover the raspberry bushes and strawberry plants due to the wind factor. I just don't know when to do this! And while I'm at it, anything special I can do to protect immature Azalea, mountain laurel, rhododendron, butterfly bush, weigela shrub, dark night shrub (caryopteris x clandonensis), 2 rose of sharon (which made buds a week ago, but the cold bit them!), forsythia (cuttings that have gone to town and made a couple of blooms last week!), mini day lilies, oriental lilies, and a dogwood sapling? And most important, when????!!!!!

I agree with MadG that sometimes brown inner parts of canes can be OK, but in my experience there's brown and there's BROWN. The good kind of brown is a light brown "blonde wood" stain color in the inner circle of the cane with a lighter circle around it that I can get on some older canes. What makes me confident that such kind of brown is OK is the firmness and smoothness of the inner darker ring. It just looks aged, but the same consistency as the rest of the cane. Any squishy cane of any color is cane that's not going to survive, in my world. Squishy brown is definitely cane that I'd prune out, and you can see the mealy consistency of the inner cane you show that doesn't look like it's going to support further growth. It's a shame that it's a Gallica, since you're not going to get as robust a bloom by pruning that off, but you still have some nice cane left. You can always leave one of your Gallicas unpruned as an experiment and watch carefully what happens with the canes. If it's too damaged, it would probably leaf out for a few weeks then gradually fade and not bloom - as soon as the leaves fade, I'd prune those canes. If your experiment Gallica blooms, then we're wrong in advising you to prune and you are heartily encouraged to log back in and correct us. The bottom line I suspect with Gallicas is that you're not pruning back to cream colored canes necessarily (since you want it to bloom on old wood and that can get gradually more brown inside with age) but checking that you have robust canes to support the spring growth and bloom. A compromise position is to wait to prune off anything but the obviously dead wood till after bloom since you'd do your major pruning of gallicas after the bloom cycle anyway. The inner brown piths don't look like the kind of canes that are likely to spread if you leave them, it's just that they don't look like they'd support growth into the blooming part of the spring. Your "after" pruning job looks good - do keep us posted on the results. Cynthia