CMK, It was really a fun "job" creating the little fence. I think a wattle would look great around your vegetable bed. It may deter rabbits a bit too if it's high enough. Go for it! I'd love to see your results when you finish it. Kathy, thanks! I do have a cellar and it is in need of a new door pretty desperately. I plan to work on that this summer and will put some white tin over it. There is a room under there (below my kitchen) that's about 10x10. My water heater is housed down there. There are also some storage shelves that I hope to put my canned jars on this fall. I have to do some insulating and get rid of the ground squirrels that have taken up living down there but after that it should be a very useful storage area. Thanks, Carrie B.!

Gramma Jan, I bought an Ivory Necklace with 25 eyes and put it in the corner of a raised bed (diamond shaped). Being unexperienced, I didn't realize how large 25 pips would become when they were unfurled. It didn't take long for it to crowd out the one I had in the middle. I took it out and put it in front of a pretty large Guacamole. Now, it looks short and "flat" not nearly as pretty as it did in the raised bed. Another example is Pilgrim. Pilgrim looked flat, dull, and rather boring to me in the ground (plus the slugs loved it). It seemed to "come to life" in the raised bed. Summer Music and Fragrant Blue are ones that I'm going to move into the German style garden were building right now (all raised beds). Both of them just look dull and flat too. I've found that if I can't seem to got a good picture of it in the ground, that it's probably a good candidate for a raised bed. Gesila

Hi Alexa, I have a few hostas that came with growers tags that are wrong. I have no idea what my Zounds-not really is. My Mack the Knife looks like the photos in the HL, however. You and Papou have Mack's with narrower leaves, which would seem more appropriate, considering the name. Maybe the leaves get wider with age? Like LS Kaleidoscope and Wolverine, for example.

Firstly... 'ssp.' is an abbreviation for subspecies, 'var.' is the abbreviation for varietas (to give it its international, Latin name). These have nothing to do with hybrids! They both indicate a level in classification below the rank of species -- i.e. a species can be subdivided into 2 or more subspecies. Thus Acacia nuperrima was subdivided into A. nuperrima subsp. nuperrima and A. nuperrima subsp. cassitera (I and many others prefer the abbreviation subsp. to ssp. because it avoids confusion with spp. meaning species plural). As it happens, in the recent Flora of Australia treatment the latter subspecies has been reclassified as A. wickhamii subsp. cassitera, leaving A. nuperrima with no division into subspecies. Var. is a more traditional classification at below-species level, many taxonomists now preferring to recognize only subspecies while others will use only var. Some use both, in a 2-level classification in which a subsp. is further divided into vars. As to hybrids in Acacia... In large areas of Australia natural hybrids seem to be rare or absent among the local Acacia species. There have been very few hybrid names published, as signified by that tell-tale multiplication sign before the specific epithet, unlike, for example, in the eucalypts. But dipping into Flora of Australia again (the 2 Acacia volumes, 2001), I find Acacia x grayana = A. brachybotrya x A. calamifolia, plus mention in notes of several other suspected hybrids in this group of species. If you could find the time to comb right through the 1100+ pages of these volumes you may find yet more. I would guess that there are strong barriers to inter-specific fertilisation in most Acacias. This is a big subject! Creating garden hybrids is unlikely to be easy.