Oh dear! I just planted a holly TREE (female) away from the house far enough that I can see it from the deck. I love the look of a nice holly TREE. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, that is the tree planted along the streets in those small planting pockets, they look great, they grow straight, they keep their leaves all year, and they are hard to kill....sounds good to me. BUT, at the house we had on the river (destroyed by Katrina), there were holly shrubs with trunks about 5" diameter, kept the size of the large camellias also planted near the house. All of these survived the salty flood waters without a stutter. They are still on the vacant lot, and far be it from me to try to dig them up. :) All your experiences remind me of the agony we are going through trying to rid ourselves of some darned CAMPHOR TREES. Those roots WILL come back. Each seed eaten by a bird will be pooped into the lawn somewhere, and I make sure I pull up seedlings before we cut the grass each week. One camphor tree we had to use the car to extract the root. We used a chain attached to the trailer hitch. As a boat captain, I can tell you DO NOT GET IN THE PATH OF A LINE UNDER TENSION...especially if it is NYLON. Like a bullwhip, they can come back on you and remove an arm or eye or (as happened to a man offshore) a head. It is very dangerous to keep increasing tension on a line. So just apply SO MUCH, and stay off to one side neither in front of nor behind the direction of pull. A well sharpened pickax (adz if you are from the nawth) can eat through a lot of wood.

I'm not sure if I should have started a new post, but my question is similar to this previous post so I added to it. I bought a house in a coastal county in Texas. There are 2 stocky citrus trees. I thought they were lemon trees. Over late summer ( I think it was) what looked like limes began to show up. A worker told me they were limes, then gave a dissertation on why they were limes not lemons: leaves, thorns, etc. I waited, but the skin didn't look ripe. Soon they got so big, I thought they were just big limes. I picked so many and gave them away....they aren't limes :-) The fruit on both looked like lemon, so several weeks ago I began picking the lemons. But the lemons are so different on the same tree. Maybe I left some on the tree too long? On one of the trees, a lemon may be twice the size of another lemon, or one may have a smooth thin skin while another has a very thick skin, and some are very orange in color and others very yellow. Now on the second tree, fruits looks like lemon on the more shaded side, but the full sun side looks like oranges for sure - they are big, round, thick rugged skinned, orange colored, they peel like oranges, are orange on the inside, but tastes just like a lemon. I'm so confused. Do oranges have a very sour taste before they are ripe? This house was built in the 1940's, and both trees, which are about 10 feet apart, are very thick with several trunks at the base. It's possible that different varieties were planted inches apart from each other I suppose. I'm guessing they were planted a long time ago because one is planted so close to a pear tree that it almost encloses around the pear tree, as if they didn't think about long term spacing; so I've pruned back quite a bit; actually both needed serious pruning, they limbs were dragging the ground every where. I'm clueless when it comes to these trees. Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks. -Nancy

Debbie, I haven't got around to checking the Velvet pod mimosa seeds yet. Will do that today. Thanks Lin. The Kwanso daylily is a very old daylily. Nobody knows how it came to be, but it's thought to be a natural 'sport'. It's sterile for the most part. Blooms later than most daylilies BTW. Shirley, I will bring some cactus pads to SAPS Oct. 9. They bloom beautifully in the spring too. The yellow flowers look great against the purple pads. Jim, I use a lot of pots because things grow better in them for me, especially roses. I don't know what's with the soil around here, but it won't hold moisture worth a hoot. That's even with all the compost and oak leaves I've added through the years. There is porous rock right under the thin soil so water just runs through it I guess. I sprinkle water holding crystals in the holes I plant in, as well as in pots and that helps some. Also it seems particularly dry here so I don't get much help with watering from rain. San Antonio's yearly average is 31 in. I think, but this area probably gets a third less being in what they call a rain shadow. It can be raining all around and not a drop at my house. Or when it does rain it will be like a monsoon for a few hours and then weeks with nothing. Oh well ... So yes, I have to water a lot, but that goes for everything. Luckily I have very good water pressure and a 5/8 hose for it to run through (which helps a LOT) so I can stand in one place and water things 15 ft or more away. With the large amount of water coming out of the hose it doesn't take as much time as you'd think. I have mulch on top of the pots and beds so the soil doesn't splash around. I installed drip irrigation years ago and used to use it a lot, but now there are emitters where there are no plants so not sure it is as efficient as it once was. Plus it is buried pretty deep by now which would be okay, but a hassel to pull it up and change emitter locations. Ideally there would be drip irrigation running to every plant and pot! Someday ... !!! As you surmised I also like pots for structure and interest and love being able to move them around. If there is a bare spot I look around for a pot I can move there. I put the pots in the flower beds so Bob doesn't have to mow around them. Also wanted to mention that if you snap the spent blooms off the phlox they will put out flowers from the sides sooner and you can keep them going for months. Thanks ibheri and all, but this is the closest I'll ever get to a blog or a book ... LOL. Just hope you all don't get too tired of me posting pictures of my little yard. I try to show you something new so you can get ideas. I just hope I don't talk too much ... :-)

Hollytone is a soil conditioner; it helps keep the soil more acidic (which hollies like) as well as provide organic and micro nutrients, if your gardeners are doing organic fertilizers, there won't be that much difference. With the recent rains and wild temperature swings, I'm wondering if it isn't root rot due to poor drainage or a small root ball? A light mulch, particularly something on the acidic side like oak leaves, won't hurt either. Hope this helps! Jim