absolutely gal ... that why i said have at it .... I TRY ... key words ... to simplify it to the max.. so the newbie ... can get just a simple answer ... perhaps get over the anxiety and go for it ... as with anything.. we can complicate it all up with actual facts and theories ... lol ... and for that.. along comes you or anyone else.. and adds another layer of info ... frankly .. that is the beauty of the GW ... so have at it ... as long as it is not personal .. i welcome all additions ... ken

Oh, boy! I've been sick and coming back and reading this is like...well, like a mandate to go to the nusery! Most of you guys have warmer gardens than me, but these still have to be plants that'll show up early here too. Nippersdad, this is my first year with Edgeworthia. My friends all went crazy over it some time ago, but I looked at those silly flower-on-stick blooms and, as much as I love fragrance and winter bloom, decided to pass. Then I saw a mature plant all leafed out in another garden, and wow! The foliage is lush, even a bit on the tropical side, and it makes a very handsome plant for a position you'll be passing by a lot. Not so in winter, but then you get to spend the whole fall and early winter watching and waiting as those buds swell, so it is really a prize. That's very valuable information about daphne, Steve, and I'm writing it down to remember. It's still on my must-have-someday list so I haven't managed to kill it yet. What a great trip, Razorback. I love the Tama types but they sold out during a trip I made with friends to Fort Valley before I could grab one. Speaking of wanting more room, I used to live about 15 minutes from Descanso Gardens and 20 from Nuccio's Nursery, but my entire garden, carved out of the side of a mountain, totaled about 4000 square feet. I had 5 camellias in the shady back. Candytuft's always been on the list, Mk87, but it suddenly jumped up big time on the tidy groundcover list I'm trying to put together. I have so much dirt to cover and am already seeing that vining groundcovers are going to be a major hassel to control in large spaces. Thank you. A plant that's doing very nicely in my garden is lime thyme. Lemon thyme kept dying back after a while, but lime thyme's looking very pretty and fresh out there right now. If rodents (I assume) hadn't eaten my little species tulips, they would have been a wonderful picture. I'll be trying again. I don't mind all the learning experiences so much, it's that they take soooo long! I'm afraid of what another of these cycles is going to do, even though I have no winter-flowering camellias yet (it's so cold here I have to stick with winter-hardy, with maybe a couple of my favorites tucked against the house. What a difference these warm temperatures made since my post on New Year's Day, though. My tiny Osmanthus delavayi now has tiny buds at each leaf joint, so it will bloom after all, and both witch hazels, virginiana and Primavera, are opening flowers I thought had been killed by that early cold. These are my first from them, and I was thrilled to find their fragrances lovely and easy to discern from even one open flower (turns out they start blooming from the bottom, so I'm on my knees in the mud checking them out). Also looking very nice out there is Lavandula stoechas, Spanish lavender. The label's gone (do birds fly off with them?), so I don't know what cultivar, if any, but it's a very handsome tidy mound of a pretty pale green-blue-gray. And has a wonderful fragrance when you brush your hand over in passing or pinch off a piece to carry along. It's not in an especially dry or well-draining spot but doesn't seem to have been bothered by the rains so far. My husband needs me. A window just blew out of his workshop.

Uh oh, I feel like I just walked into someone's dorm room with a big bag of tortilla chips! I'm happy to share cuttings, but my plant is not that large, and I'd rather not chop it completely back, although I suppose I'll eventually get more branching stems, and hence more blooms, that way! I'll send cuttings in the order that folks posted, and we'll set up trades individually, sound good? Before you queue up, keep in mind, noses differ, and this one can be rather ephemeral, lasting only one or two mornings per bloom, so no guarantees on how you'll like the fragrance! Jim I'll

Yes even here it's still an evolving situation. For example, I would now rank the damage on Ilex 'Scepter' as being more severe than that on 'Sand Pond'. Once again proving how a 100% American X American hybrid is more resistant to our capricious weather than an Asian X European one...as you'd expect. Because the leaves of 'Sand Pond' are obviously reviving themselves, but those of 'Scepter' continue to dessicate and turn papery brown. I wish I had a male I. integra, it would be cool to make a 'Sand Pond' X integra cross. (I should clarify versus what I said on Feb 23rd: some 'Scepter' leaves were still undamaged at that point. All 'Sand Pond' leaves had minor damage. Now, ALL 'Scepter' leaves are basically dead and some are already falling off. Most 'Sand Pond' leaves still have damage but the green bits are getting greener, it seems. The March 5 freeze was by far the most damaging of the winter) There's some rather odd damage now becoming apparent even on Abies ernestii...sometimes rated as hardy as 5b and I've seen a huge, beautiful one near Rochester, NY. (part of the reason I bought one) The leaves have little yellowish spots...I might post to the conifer forum to see if someone has seen anything like it. They are so subtle they might be impossible to photograph. It's like a very subtle variegation. Certainly not serious, but fascinating. All in all as they say, it still could have been worse. It also makes me feel good about my choice years ago not to invest in trying a big, expensive Trachycarpus palm. Because I thought north of about St. Michael's, MD or maybe Cape May, NJ - and even those locations are really really pushing it- they have no chance of being truly long term plants w/o protection. I knew another winter like 1994 would happen, and it did. What I did not know is we would have 2 in a row! I reiterate that 'Soquel' is my best looking Sequoia...granted it is my oldest but the bigger 'Swarthmore Hardy'/'Chapel Hill' has been in the ground a while, too, and arguably in a better spot. (better soil) Not that it is an appropriate rating, but I'm reminded of Dr. Dirr's former SEO website that rated 'Soquel' as zn 6 hardy. Not true but he apparently had some information about it surviving cold temperatures well, which it does. If you need to try one in the DC area, I'd now recommend that over any of the others. I want to try to see the huge tree in Silver Spring MD this spring, to see how it weathered things, and the 2 that are almost as big in NoVA. BTW - given that exposed Leylands were damaged even last winter in the outer suburbs of Baltimore, I definitely think most of New England would be stretching it for them.