I have had success planting elephant ears for the last few years. I've left them in the ground, except for the couple times I took some in containers into the garage and left them there for winter. I heavily mulched the ones in the ground over winter (about 8 inches of cedar mulch), with no watering in winter. They usually come back bigger the next year, although some have rotted. I'll be uncovering them in the next few days, and I'll "help" slough off some of the decayed tops, if there are some that have decayed. When I do this, they usually sprout new growth shortly thereafter. Some have grown to amazing size: as high as about 8 feet, with a base over 2 feet. Don't give up on the ones you planted, but remember that frost knocks them back, and they have to be mulched in winter. Let's hope you weren't too early. When they get going, I sprinkle bone meal around the area above the bulb a few times during summer, and it seems to keep them going strong. Good luck!

I saw the movie before reading the book. I really enjoyed the movie. Loved the book. I am glad I saw the movie first. I am always disappointed in movies after reading the books. I thought it was odd how they blended two of the main book characters but thought the actor did a fantastic job with the role.

June, please don't forget to tell us who you think Marlena was calling when she asked Jacob to wish her luck. I finally located the passage, but I had lost the context so I had to back up and reread that chapter. It didn't help me, thus I'm thinking it must allude to something even further back that didn't register with me -- unless it was, as Lydia says, someone she could contact about getting a job with Ringling Bros. Vee, re redlighting, that act of throwing nonproductive or unwanted people off the train: The word itself definitely came from circus jargon. I had to look it up to make sure. (Does anyone else think Gruen could/should have provided a glossary?) I don't know if it was done in quite so dramatic a way as Gruen describes; the sites I went to said it was done mainly when the train was going slowly, before it got up to full speed -- the people hit the ground, perhaps with a hard landing, but most were able to get up unhurt (or with minor injuries), yet there was no way they could catch up with the train and get aboard again. If bodies of maimed or dead people were littering either sides of the tracks or under the trestles, surely there would have been some questions asked by the folk who found the bodies and authorities would have been alerted. I know it was the Depression and there were things that often went unreported, but if it happened with great enough frequency, there would have been some sort of outcry -- people were people during the Depression, too, and they all weren't cowed by circumstance. My father, as a teenager in the early 1930s, did some railriding. He and his buddies would hitchhike to Chicago, then hop a train to New Orleans and then hop another for the return to Chicago. (From New Orleans, he made it to Los Angeles and on to Seattle before retracing.) They could do it legally in an empty freight car for a penny a mile, but of course many didn't have the funds. The legals would hide the illegals under clothes and blankets, but the "tosser" often managed to find them and, true to his job title, he tossed them off the train, physically. According to daddy, he was tossed off a few times himself. Daddy referred to it as redlighting, so the circus phrase was in the vernacular at the time. I didn't get sappy about the animals in Gruen's story as much as I did about Camel and Walter being thrown off the train while it was on the trestle. Maybe such things happened, maybe they didn't -- I'll allow Gruen license, anyway, although I wonder why she thought it was necessary to kill them off. But that poor little dog, Queenie, without Walter... And what makes it particularly affecting to me was the earlier scene when Queenie was lost and Walter would have missed the train to look for her, if Jacob hadn't physically thrown Walter onto the moving train. I hate being manipulated by a writer with poignant animal scenes, but I have to admit Gruen pulled a good 'un on me.

This summer I put half of elephant ears in well draining soil that was frequently watered and the other in a small basket of soil made for aquatic plants in a tub of water. The ones that drained were huge. The other was stunted by comparison. Of course I can't tell what would have happened if the soil basket had been larger.