If it's voles, they are eating away at the roots, and the plant will slowly and inexplicably die. If you tug at the stalks of the plants the roots will feels "loose", and the soil may seem disturbed or fluffy around the root ball. Several years back I had a terrible problem with voles in the 2 garden beds in front, and they ate all my Kobold. Now I sprinkle a castor oil solution I read about on the Hosta forum on those beds when necessary. This works unbelievably well and it lasts for months! Do a search on this forum for "voles castor oil" or such and some threads will no doubt come up.

This summer a lot has been going on so it has been a really stressful time in my life, and because we have literally 100's of plants to care for, this area has been neglected. I don't believe the browning and dying out occurred until after the spikes bloomed. I normally would have deadheaded by now, but..... My second pix shows a plant that I didn't deadhead yet, but it has not gone immediately to the state the other one is in. The bad plant has probably now most of the stems brown with wilted brown leaves - look dead to me. Neither was deadheaded yet, but you can see the difference. If I cut out the dead stuff in the sick plant, there won't be much plant left. Thought maybe I should just cut out all the dead stuff and stake the rest to make it look as good as possible, but didn't know if closing it up like that would make the plant as a whole more susceptible to whatever ails it.

Agreed. I have never touched the digital zoom on my camera or my cell. Digital zoom sbould be done on the pc just like u did under a different file name. What photo program do you have? I prefer a free one called Paint.net Their website sucks anymore. To many ads for a bigger program GIMP. Not that I dont own GIMP as well, it does read and edit PDF files more or less. Comes in more handy at work than home.

Thank you. It's really amazing to see how the area where the garden used to be looks today. More trees, but then some of the originals gone by now. The borders I resurrected this Spring form a smaller rectangle than the original in the old photos. Another interesting bit about the Monet Garden was that being planted from perennial seedlings, some didn't bloom the first year or the second maybe; so you were always surprised by something new. Back then was the first time I had ever seen the yellow Centurion(sp??)with the fluffy thistle like blooms? I'm too lazy to look it up. Anyway, it was so exotic looking and grew into a big tall mound. I think you can see it in one of the photos in a corner.