Sounds like so much fun, I'll be watching the Buffalo Round-up at Custer State Park about then so can't make it. Be sure to take pictures for those of us not there and I'll take a Buffalo shot or two!

Sounds exciting! Do you know if the garden tour of the rose garden with Tom is free or is that part of $120 package? Thanks Jackie

Garden tour is included in the registration. Bus tour is extra. I plan to be there and will look forward to seeing you all who go as well.

One of the things I am very interested in re the Huntington garden tour is finding out about the use of some sort of beneficial insects to fight chili thrips - I read (I think on here) that that is what they are doing, as chili thrips have made it to So Cal, and the Huntington garden is no spray. I am afraid they might get to No Cal sometime, so I am very interested in what they are doing and how it is working.

Jackie

We'll have plants there for raffle/auction/sale, but ours will have been treated according to Florida quarantine standards, approved by California Agriculture for shipment to California. So they should be thrips-free and remain so for up to 3 months. But otherwise, yes, what Kim says is extremely important.

Thank you, Malcolm!

OK I won't even TOUCH any of the plants growing in the garden (although I might look at Malcolm's which are for sale or etc.

Jackie

I'm debating whether or not to go. Like Jackie, I would like to, but I've been traveling a lot lately and I'm all traveled out. I've decided to put a decision off a couple of weeks and decide later.

Rosefolly - good idea. Life is always better when you have caught up on your sleep!

Jackie

What plants are you bringing/sending Malcolm?

We've rooted some of the rare Teas from the Hooks, as well as some other rarities from Vintage, SJHRG, and the Sacramento Cemetery folks. I don't have my list here at home tonight. Oh, also some California foundlings -- Pulich Children, Benny Lopez, etc.

Paula, the conference motel has a very good deal right now for online booking of rooms at only $89 a night - better than the block of rooms that are being held for the conference. So, if you are thinking of coming, you might want to snag rooms now. I am really happy about the preconference tour and think that everybody will enjoy seeing such two different southern California historic sites. The Rancho has Olmsted-brother designed gardens which I am looking forward to seeing. We will be having a reception Friday night, and dinner at Il Fornaio should be most excellent along with Stephen's talk. I hope that you come!

Any species or eglantines?

I can't think of any species. And I don't grow any Eglantines.

It did not take me long to recover my sense of adventure. I just signed up. Looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Tom has a ham radio event that same weekend so he will be traveling in the opposite direction. I'm considering getting a house sitter in so we won't have to board the dogs.

I sure wish I could attend. But I can only do day trips.

Kip, perhaps you could make a day trip just for Saturday. That is when the talks will take place. It would be lovely to meet you.

I said above that I couldn't think of any species I planned to bring. Actually we may have a few "Bremo" musk (R. moschata plena). The Bremo accession was described in Marie Butler's article, "Discovering the Musk Rose in America," in the Proceedings of the 9th International Heritage Rose Conference, in Charleston SC, 2001. (Those proceedings are still available through the Heritage Rose Foundation). She says "In autumn of 1988 yet another discovery of Rosa moschata occurred. Peggy Cornett, Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historical Plants (CHP) at Monticello near Charlottesville, Virginia, wrote of this finding in Twin Leaf: Annual Journal and Catalog No. 2, 2000. Again history is intimately bound with this discovery. As she wrote in that issue in Twin Leaf, she, Douglas Seidel, consultant for the Leonie Bell Rose Garden, and CHP nursery manager, Diane Lowe, found the "Musk Cluster Rose" at "The Recess" at Bremo some forty miles from Monticello. Records indicated that this specimen, tended by Raymond and Frances Orf, the latter the great-granddaughter of Gen. John Hartwell Cocke, was purchased by the General from Benjamin Prince's Nursery in 1815." There's much more about it there, which I'll not type here. So that's an interesting rose that we should have at least a few of. It's identical to the other common double musk roses "out there," but has this historically interesting provenance.

I stuck a bunch of cuttings of 'Sui Mei Ren' today. It's cutting things close for them to be ready for conference time, but we'll keep fingers crossed. This is one people are gushing over, on Facebook.