Interesting though, more of a plant native to Florida than MN, and definitely Tuscon! This reminds me I need to plant my ashei hybrid of some kind, sold by Woodlanders. It's getting a bit too big for its pot, and i think it's now big enough it should be able to fend for itself.

Funny I was just about to start a thread, but decided against it, of "people who have gone missing over the years". That name does vaguely ring a bell, but not one I was thinking of, specifically.

Checked my spreadsheet. It's actually an ashei X macrophylla hybrid I have, but other than Woodlanders doesn't seem to be very widely documented. Didn't appear to be grafted so I assume it was a seedling.

This is straight asheii. This species is very hardy - grew fine in zone 4 Mn.

Wow. Impressive for a Florida-mostly subspecies; but then the Magnolias have managed to survive on this Earth for a while! Most sources list it as zone 5 or 6.

very nice I can smell it from here. Am looking out my window at mine, it will be at least 3 weeks before it blooms. I always look for the purple stains at the base of the petals. Mine is a solitary tree and never makes seed.

I think of John from time to time. I didn't know him well, but I did get on a couple garden tours in St Paul with him. Interesting and talented young man; I wish we still had him.

Have you seen any mature M. tripetala in the Twin Cities? They are supposedly hardy well beyond their native range, but I've never run across one of any size. Mine could be mistaken for asparagus.

Strange though, I got curious and looked at the houzz/gardenweb profile of that user name. Easy to do: just look at anyone else's and swap the name in the URL. The person who comes up for bombax,here: bombax
Is from FL & TN and only posted 10 times. Surely not the same person? I'd thought I had a vague memory of that name, but maybe not. I most vividly remember the people I've had skirmishes with LOL! Like greyneedles, one of the long lists of "redwoods couldn't possibly grow on the east coast" posters. He's long gone. (funny enough the growth of eastern US redwoods was discussed all the way back around 1999, and by tediously pulling up old gardenweb posts in archive.org a couple years ago, I was able to track down, after emailing a poster from that era, who likely introduced the form called 'Swarthmore Hardy', but which is almost certainly 'Chapel Hill' earlier selected by Camellia Forest. He was an academic from the Philly area but not from Swarthmore.)

It is especially sad to me that a younger person who was into plants is no longer with us. It seems in the world of horticulture specifically various "online forums" the younger personalities are even more fugitive, generally, than the older ones. I was on Hardy Palms back to its insidetheweb days starting in 97, when I was still in college, although I remember lurking for a few months before summoning the "courage" to post something. Seems so silly now but posting anything about oneself online seemed like a 'big deal'. Over the years a number of young posters would show up, try to make a splash for a month or so, and then never be seen again. So I guess like a crusty old barnacle I'm the exception! (and am of course, no longer really young, though when I meet various horticultural groups, I still feel young The only other person who was that young, that far back, and is still around in some form or another...is Ian the owner of Desert Northwest. Although he isn't online as much anymore cause I assume he's bogged down with the nursery.)

Gardenweb was around back then too, though annoyingly I can't remember what my ID was. It's funny how I remember some people from that era vividly, like a woman in Fredericksburg, VA, who told me she had mature plants of Genista aetnensis, Arbutus unedo, Leycesteria and a couple others that piqued my interest. Alas I lost the emails I exchanged with her...but about 10 years ago (! how time flies!) was able to track her name down, probably again through archive.org and various other resources like ussearch; she moved to Florida in the early 2000s and last posted to GW around that time.

BTW I've asked this before I think but it's always haunted me. Garden.com was the first mail order plant nursery I remember ordering from; of course I'd already ordered from strictly mail order (back then in the mid 90s) places like camforest, Greer, etc.

I have a memory of somehow getting to gardenweb through garden.com. Like maybe the front page was a portal, and it somehow linked to here? Does that ring a bell to anyone? The first archive.org entry for garden.com in 1996, shows some kind of "chat with gardeners" feature, but the link doesn't exactly work. Could be a false memory...maybe they were affiliated for a while and then separated. Oh well.

Interestingly a lot of the rarer plants sold by garden.com were grown by Emerisa gardens in Sonoma Co. I'm almost sure the first plant I ordered from them - in other words the first plant where I remember actually "checking out" online, versus calling or mailing an order in - was a Fuchsia regia. Someone tipped me off that this species would be more heat tolerant on the east coast, and it was. The tag showed it was grown by Emerisa and somehow I remember this fact being discussed in a forum "a lot of their plants are coming from Emerisa". Garden.com had, for that time especially, a really amazing selection of stuff. Would make sense as they were a wholesaler fairly close to Silicon valley. I _finally_ got to see this place a couple weeks ago! They have a retail sales yard, but no species Fuchsias anymore and like a lot of wholesalers that survived the great recession, the focus seems to have turned from rare or rarer plants to whatever will be cheap to produce and easy to sell...I mean by California standards of course. You'd still see things like Aeoniums, nicely grown but that's not very hard there! The ladies running the till did let me look at the master plant list for the wholesale operation. To get things off that list, I'd have had to place a special order and pick them up a week later...not possible of course as I was traveling.

Ok, while for some reason I'm having an 'attack of the olden times': 3 (edit 4, I better stop!) posters I can remember right off the top of my head, we no longer see.

pinetree30 - I just remember he was a retired professor who once in a while challenged the great pineresin.

fairfield from the Gulf

mcpotts - Virginia gardener who seemed to be collecting interesting stuff

livenez - rhodie collector in SE PA

Of course I "met" mcpotts via my epic battle with floralmakros. Who apparently left the forum in dramatic fashion when it became clear she wasn't going to be allowed to be some kind of great thought-leader and arbiter of who gets to try which rare plants in which parts of the country ;-) And though I seem like I'm being petty I've been dying to mention that I saw a seedling P. maximartinezii for sale at Berkeley. It was SO tempting to buy it LOL. But I didn't.

There are many other names I see when I look at very old posts, click on their profile and think "ahh yes we haven't seen them for a while"

I miss the sometimes iconoclastic presence of pinetree30. I'm sure he and I went around a couple times but his was a solid and experienced contribution. I don't think he ever made the jump to Houzz.

I belong at some other forums and one in particular-me and the top mod have now "known" each other through three separate iterations of that forum. So, so many have dropped off by the wayside there over what is now decades. Sad, including some deaths. I don't know yet exactly what it means to "know" someone online, but it still hurts to lose any of them.

Yeah, I admit to probably being someone who "spends too much time online". (I'm sure some people are already thinking it, so, woe is me. I try to live in a strictly reality-based worldview! I don't care what people think of me! I'm not 'Aspergers' though I'm sure some idiot untrained pop-psychologist might diagnose me with it these days. I can be perfectly schmoozy if I think someone "matters" - i.e., in a work setting.) But anyhow, I USED to spend even more time in various forums reflective of my interests. For example, photography (first) and then digital photography. Some music related forums, etc. etc. But as you are saying if you are on any kind of forum for years, eventually there's a somewhat sad sense that of all the people present at a given point in time in the past, most of them are gone for some reason, voluntarily or involuntarily. I haven't gotten close to anyone who has died _here_ yet, but it has happened to me on other forums.

" I don't know yet exactly what it means to "know" someone online, but it still hurts to lose any of them." And I think that's putting, in a more succinct way, exactly why I was bringing those people up.