emailed

Kim - am so glad you got all set up over bryan way. did you find a good source for sux? made a trip up here to longhorn country to check out the spots we suggested? your gh looks much like the one i built last year - works great, no? WSG - i am right up the road from Kim and here we get perhaps 6-12 nights a yr when it goes to 25-32 (lite freeze by my definition) and perhaps a couple below 25 (hard freeze - again my definition). (my brother is saying my estimation is off by as many as 7 days (combined) per year...but mom agrees with me - so there ya have it LOL) either way, i doubt Kim will get much use of a heater. i use those little xmas lites myself. lol kim by the time it feels fall to you from ohio it will be spring again!

I love my 'Springfire's, looking forward to them getting as big as the one in your photos. The plantings look so fabulous, the house needs something to match it. The house needs some wider trim around the windows, or something, some architectural detail up higher, around the windows, just up somewheres. The gorgeous garden is outshining the house something terrible.

When you say it didn't survive the first winter inside, but revived in the spring, what do you mean? Did it drop leaves and die back to the stem? That very pale orange foliage looks like variegation to me, not stress coloration as I think the other posters are thinking. Variegation refers to areas of little or no chlorophyll, whereas stress coloration is a reaction to intense sun (and often cold) in which the plant produced other colors in addition to the green chlorophyll - kind of like sunscreen. I don't believe the pale areas of your plant could photosynthesize at all. The only parts of the plant able to photosynthesiize were the green parts, and they had to feed the whole plant. I can only guess what caused it (it can sometimes be a virus), but IMO, that appearance wasn't sustainable. The plant HAD to produce more green leaves or die. I had an Aeonium kiwi that did something similar. It started out green with white, pink, and orange variegation, but then it grew like gangbusters and all the new growth came in white and a little pink at the edges- no green. It was absolutely stunning to look at, but with only a few older green leaves to feed the whole plant, it weakened and succumbed to a mite infection. It didn't have enough resources (stored energy) to come back. I think you're lucky yours is alive at all. If I'm correct about what was going on, I don't think it'll ever be orange like that again, and that's good. Maybe it'll get some orange variegation, but not so much that all the new growth is pale and without chlorophyll. here is a photo of mine as it was turning completely white.