Hi all; I would like to introduce myself, too, although I'm afraid my story is more of a lab notebook entry than a fairy tale. I am a newbie in this forum, although I have been growing African violets for a few years. I have always liked the green and yellow ones, but most of my collection did not survive moving across the country 4 years ago. After that, I was content with my three survivors (Blue Dragon, Blueberry Splash, and a trailer that I grew from a Park seed packet). I enjoyed them, but didn't really feel like getting any more. Then I read this interesting book called "The Botany of Desire." The main premise is that just as plants and insects co-evolve, shaping each other's characteristics, we have a powerful effect on plants, and they have an effect on us. Offering something that people want, like fruit, flowers, or bioactive natural products, is a good evolutionary strategy for a plant. However, the downside of this comes when everybody wants the same thing - the huge genetic diversity of the ancestral apple tree is ignored because everyone buys red delicious apples. This made me think about my African violets, and how a lot of them have been selected to make a flat, symmetric rosette for showing, and I started wondering what other interesting things lurk in the African violet genome. And then I discovered the David Senk plants. I'm a huge fan. So far, I have a plantlet of Say What, and two leaves of Merlot. I can't wait for Merlot to produce plantlets. It's so weird! Longfolia, bustles, a little bit of variegation, what could be better? I also thought it would be nice to check out some of the older varieties, so I picked up Blue Tail Fly and Celery. Hooray for eBay! Anyway, it's nice to (virtually) meet you all -seems like a good crowd. Rachel

A few responses to your reflection (yeah, it took me a few minutes to figure out what a "relection" was, but I'm not criticizing because I have many figuretip-brain misfires.) First off, Garden Writer's Forum may be more correct, because it sure seems like there's never more than one of us around at a time. If this is meant to be a forum for many garden writers, then "writers'" is the correct form. Second, as to your garden question, garden web hosts many forums on many topics. Click on the "Other Forums" caption up near the top of the page and you can see the whole list. Your post on the cucomber beetle may be more appropriate on a vegetable gardening forum. Last, even though you said it wasn't needed, welcome! Hope you hang around a bit and add some life here.

dedtired, My God, how extreme can people get? I know things are organised differently here in the UK ie money for libraries etc coming from the local County/City Council using funds from both central Govt. and the 'rates' though money has been drastically cut-back in recent years . . . but no citizen of whatever political persuasion would actively seek to down-grade a town's library services, nor would they dare suggest handicapped folk be denied access, especially in these PC days. If your library is run by a Board of Trustees, there must be some legal agreement from when it was first set up. Worth reading the small print to check the wording. Look out for "to benefit the whole population of the town" or "for the education and enjoyment of future generations" etc. Then tell them to stick it in their cauldron and give it a good stir.

Until my arthritic wrists and fingers cannot hold a book at all, the web will not be a substitute. I suspect, no I am sure, that the people here on GW who are encyclopedic in their knowledge learn, learned, and re-learned from books (as well as experience and the web) Is it a generational thing, this difference between learning from reading a book and learning from the web? There's a lot to gry_'s comment about finding something again on the web (though one can become more skilled at bookmarking) and findiing it in a familiar book. The book can carry physical evidence of experience: the soiled pages of a frequently turned to topic (like my brownies, roast turkey and bread recipes in my first cook book; you could boil the book and get the nutritional equivalent of a meal) The penned notations in the margin (really, did my handwriting look like that 20 years ago) I really don't think I'd remember Dirr's comment about the edibility of the Kousa dogwood fruit "I'd rather have a Snickers" if I hadn't read it dozens of times over the years. Dirr's books are bedside reading all winter. Alas, the encyclopedias were actually too heavy for me to hold comfortably.. I think I'll need an adaptive pillow or tray to get through this winter. I love the internet; I spend a lot of time on it. But I suspect way deep down that I believe the learning from access to so much information is somehow inferior to learning from books. I think that's wrong and the wrongness will be proved repeatedly from research. But I'm talkiing about a prejudice born of hours of learning since childhood how to parse info in books, assimilate it and reorganize it for one's own use.....or come up with an original idea of one's own! What a great question!