The thing about wrongly labeled trees is you want to keep the original tree and get another. Usually nurseries don't guarantee the correct identity of the tree, only survival. It would be a can of worms, in a way, to guarantee true to name as it would be difficult to verify. I used to manage a site where 50 Green Gage plums from Adam's County Nursery were planted that turned out to be a J. plum sometimes called Japanese Green Gage. Adam's take was home growers wouldn't know the difference and they weren't selling any to commercial producers so no harm no foul. They also said there was no established true Green Gage. Pretty shoddy reasoning from my perspective. These clients had tasted real Green Gage plums in France so the trees weren't worth much to them but the installation and maintanence cost them thousands of dollars. I consider Adams CN to be a good source of trees and like other producers for commercial production, they are usually reliably true to name. Stark also produces trees for com. pro. so my guess is that they are more reliable than many outfits that only serve home growers. I'd order from them way before going to Gurney or Millers for instance.

Jeri, is yours always single? There was a single next to GV, that was accidentally taken out a year or so ago when the trees were trimmed, and deadwood removed. Originally Mel called them Birddrop 1 and Birddrop 2. I agree that the rose here does not appear to be GV. I don't know who propagated this plant. It was donated to us for the sale 2 years ago, IIRC, and was left over. I said she could have it when the one she bought in Sacto turned out to be a different rose. I guess we will have to propagate another plant or two. Jill

Julie, those are sunflowers..the kind that get a huge 8ft and flowers that sometimes look like dinner plates. They have blooms all the way down their stalk (plus the stalks are often down on the ground after a wind) which is why it was so close to ST. Here is Prairie Tornado FFO today. It was very hard to photograph this dark red color, especially with it facing away from the sun. I eventually used the blade of an old aluminum snow shovel for a reflector...master of improvising :D I'm going to really like this one once it gets established. It is registered as ML but this is VL in our season. Wonder if it will always bloom this late? It came from a state south of me with similar bloom season so no using the excuse of having started the spring in a more northerly state with this one.

No, I do know for a fact that around here, an offer on a short sale that is accepted by the seller but waiting for their lender to accept is "pending" or "pending short sale". We never did find out what exactly was up. My agent called the listing agent, the listing agent said that the listing should have been changed to "pending", and hours later it was. Because I am a cynical and cranky wench, my suspicion is that perhaps the listing agent brought in a buyer, and wanting both seller and buyer commissions clogged up the tubes for 12 hours or so with this "mutual agreement" crap until his/her buyer was able to rustle up a real offer. As someone said, though, it's not like we could do anything about it even if that were true, so onward. (BTW we understand the pitfalls inherent in the short sale system, but since our budget is quite low, we'd rather deal with the pitfalls than eliminate that entire pool prospective houses. And it is a large pool; lots of short sales around here.)