This is an easy one that looks great. I see it on a side street I take sometimes, so I haven't stopped for a picture. Maybe this year. Echinacea--Magnus, or even the old reliable Shasta Daisy Becky A small hosta with green and yellow-green leaves and short stalks of closely spaced, darker-than-usual, lavender/purple flowers. The bloom times mesh nicely and all the plants are very easy care. I am working on getting a stand of this going in my yard. The spot I tried is too overrun with maple roots (outside the drip line but thick with those roots nonetheless) so nothing but the daisies really succeeded there. Hard to believe, but the hostas are sulking in that spot. For a few years, I had a nice grouping of orange oriental poppies, Alaska daisies, and purple dutch iris. They all petered out, but one day I may try that again. Steve, I love your yarrow, russian sage and lychnis. I have all of those, I should just get them more chummy so I can enjoy that beautiful look. Everyone's photos are so inspiring. Much better than looking at the plant catalogs. Hepatica

Well that's pretty interesting that at least one district collects the numbers of entries by class. New York district does not (or if they do nobody has told me). Not being in the "Handbook for Selecting Roses" just means it's not in the "Handbook for Selecting Roses". Most of my roses aren't. For crying out loud, even Quadra isn't listed in the "Handbook". It's real easy to fall off the straight and narrow. It is a conundrum. We say we want to see more shrubs and OGRs entered in rose shows, but the barriers are considerable. The number of roses I've shown over the years that have changed official exhibition name or show classification is dizzying. It's a lot to expect a person to keep track of. The "Official List of Approved Exhibition Names" is published annually, and costs $10. If we really expect a person to stay current, this information should be available for download. Don't know. I think I'd like to see fewer exhibition classes, and more courts. It's hard to see that the much trumpeted Floribunda court has much relevance here. A shrub court or OGR court? Now your talking! If I had to guess, I would say Rosa setigera will not bloom in time for the Hartford show next week. Many of my favorite roses never make it to a rose show. There's nothing to be done about that. They are what they are.

Mmm, autumn always seems like the start of the gardeners year - new bulbs, lots of pruning, cuttings for overwintering, harvest, ladling on compost and planting the new bare root fruits, roses and shrubs. After a truly bizarre rainless summer, the allotment has turned sere and brown much earlier than usual. Rudbeckias, dahlias and heleniums and asters had an attenuated show - I always struggle with these prairie type beauties on my sandy soil but one must have them. This year, not even emergency hosing was going to prolong the luminous late summer show of golds, bronzes and purples so I turned my face to the gravel garden which never fails to thrive. Melissa, how I love spanish broom - yep, Spartium junceum can be a thug but what a gorgeous fragrant and elegant one. They twist and bend, making fantastically gnarly shapes and grow huge and fat in East Anglia. Cytisus also grows to shocking tree size, as does Tamarix. Desperate savage pruning has been done. even though the shrubs in question are less than 6 years old, they are eating the shed. A glorious stipa gigantea, planted so carefully to filter the low evening sun, has been overshadowed one one side and totally mugged by a giant acanthus on the other. In truth, the entire gravel garden has to be redone, lifting the remnants of the old membrane (which utterly failed to prevent the millions of verbena, centranthus, ox-eye daisies, althea and eryngiums from seeding with total abandon) and replacing plants which should never have been placed there (legion - Dieramas, Schizostylus, echinaceas - embarrassing how clueless I was to plant these moisture lovers in gravel!!!)Then there are the plants which clearly love it but are far too keen - helianthemums, nepetas, salvias, hebes - small cushions are ground swallowing mounds. Apart from lots of lavender - I have hedges of L Hidcote - the deepest blue, I do not have as many silver plants as I would like. A colony of pulsatilla does well with summer silky seedheads. Santolina and a lone artemisia (Powis Castle - another huge thing). Would like to try astelia and also celmisias. A plant grown much by Ingrid, and a revelation to me, was Limonium - violetta, I have and it looks terrific with eryngiums and stipa tenuissima. Stachys or Phlomis have, so far, failed to touch my heart and I have done verbascums to death. Still throwing out flowers is the modest Zauschneria, looking good with the last of the escholzias, Salvia greggii and microphylla are flowering profusely and unstoppable. Also, pushing out another cycle of flowers - a lovelu silver leafed mound of erodium chrysantha (might be good for you, Melissa, it is a lovely thing). However, much of this is happening out of my sight since I am woefully stuck at home in a kitchen which resembles Entebbe. A simple flooring job turned into armageddon - the massively heavy cast-iron and enamel sink is upside down on the sofa, the old washing machine has been drug to the tip and a new (to me) one has arrived - although the sink issue means it is still in the middle of the kitchen. Am running out of knickers and socks - may have to be a slut and turn them inside out since the whole water system is now only usable with a lot of fiddling about with stopcocks. In a moment of frenzy, I thought we may as well go the whole way and ripped off great swathes of old painted wallpaper - which of course, came off really easily....on one wall - the rest seems as though it was cemented in position. The ingrates (offspring) have absented themselves for large amounts of time yet still manage to materialise at sensitive (shouty, sweary) moments and chip in with ludicrous suggestions (we could put speakers in the new sink cupboards, why don't we have an indoor hammock?)Estimates of finishing time have gone from 'around a week' to 'in time for Christmas'. We are eating a lot of 'bread based snacks' - although the rate of jam consumption is worrying as I was definately slack this year, using the virusey raspberries as an excuse to cut down on all the 'earth mother' nonsense I had somehow got myself into(what was I thinking?) May be forced onto chocolate spread - sweetheart can have marmalade (shudder). Even so, it has been a spectacular tomato year (no rain - no blight)- have had kilos and kilos from 40 plants. I now have wrists of iron from poking hundreds of tomatoes through a sieve. The first bareroots will be arriving soon so I will have every reason to flee the kitchen chaos.

Melissa wrote: "Climate in my garden is similar to Kim's but my care is different. I'm not nearly as nice to my roses in general.;) I water less, and feed differently I think. No chemical fertilizers at all." I think your "winter cold" is deeper than mine. (9b v. 10a, Sunset Zones probably between 18 and 19 for you, 20 to 21 for me) It seems your soil is quite a bit different in origin from what I've seen on line, being more of a deeper alluvium. Mine is the white shale layer of the Santa Monica Mountain formations. I water enough to keep plants alive, but not "thriving", particularly during the worst of the heat. I don't fertilize with anything other than prunings I shred and throw back on the soil surface as "mulch". I don't amend using anything, period. I avoid "organic" fertilizers due to the legions of moles, gophers, skunks, opossums, raccoons, coyotes, rabbits, rats, etc., all of which are either attracted by the organics themselves or to those which they attract. I don't need, nor wish to encounter any more "wildlife" that close to the house. Sometimes, it's a "witch" living this close to the "urban wilderness". I don't fertilize those in the ground with inorganic fertilizers, either. The soil is quite 'salty', as is the irrigation water. There has been no rain to flush the accumulated salts from the soil. Adding inorganics would only serve to intensify the "salts". I do use light, infrequent applications of inorganic fertilizer (always water soluble) to newly propagated, potted plants to replace the nitrogen they lose to watering. Being in an "extreme heat, extreme fire danger" area, I am allotted a relatively high level of "Tier 1" water use. I use, and have been using a quarter of that allotment, both to conserve the resource itself as well as to conserve the ever increasing cost of it. The areas I would normally irrigate show the reduced water consumption. I recently removed sixty feet of forty-plus year old escalonia hedge which had begun dying at one end and continued crisping and browning by the foot from the southern toward the northern end. Increasing the water to it had little positive effect, so eliminating the need, as I have done with all other plantings proving themselves "too needy", helps reduce the danger of combustion as well as need to increase the water bill. You might find this seedling of interest. Kim Here is a link that might be useful: Puzzlement