Last time I was in Charleston there was a great farmer's market downtown on the big plaza across the street from my hotel - there were a few plant vendors and some great food. Also, if you go see plantations, I remember good plants for sale at Magnolia Plantation (my tea camelia from there is doing just fine in my zone 7 garden). I also enjoyed Hunters Island as a walk-on-the-beach sorta thing to do.

The book to which Marc is referring is JOHN (not Geoff) Bryan's book, "Bulbs." I have both the 2-volume and single volume versions. In the picture of O. maculatum v. splendens, there is a definite whitish area around the middle of the flower petals. However, in the above picture what looks like that whitish color on a couple of petals is only a reflection. In addition, the above flowers are orange-yellow and in the O. maculatum v. splendens picture they are orange-red. The above picture is DEFINITELY O. dubium or a cultivar thereof, as stated by maddy and confirmed by others. The picture of O. dubium in Manning, Goldblatt & Snijman's book on bulbs matches the above picture, while the O. maculatum picture does not, and they do not even mention O. maculatum v. splendens.

"... dwarf crape myrtles along the foundation... should be 6 feet away" General comments are often made about CMs without clarifying their stature. Miniature or dwarf CMs have leaf areas similar to other like-sized foundation shrubs, so can be treated the same. Though another potential issue with planting dwarf CMs too close to a building is too much shade to flower reliably, especially if there is substantial roof overhang. We've had two dwarfs and three miniatures as foundation plants for a couple decades without problems and they were planted only 24 to 30 inches from the slab along the east face. However, we do have a drip irrigation circuit in those beds to maintain moisture around the foundation. One other observation is that the dwarfs (and larger sized miniatures) we've had always seem to mature to heights 1 to 3 feet taller than the range given on the label. Just something to check into if your vertical fit is tight. Edit: Mature cenzios in our Dallas neighborhood seem to get leggy at the bottom when they stop getting full sun as the surrounding trees grow. Bush germander (Teucrium fruticans) is a well adapted non-invasive silver-leaf alternative that seems to hang onto its lower leaves a bit better and can be left natural or sheared like boxwood. Though flowers do not stand out as nicely as on TX sage. 'Azure' is a better flowering dwarf bush germander cultivar that is supposed to top out around 4 ft instead of the 6 to 8 ft given for the standard variety.

I hate it when life gets in the way of shopping. I try to have a well-balanced lifed during gardening season: spending half my time gardening and the other half shopping for the garden. Well, I'm just kidding about that, but Tim would say that we do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time at this time of the year looking for this or that, and he's probably right. I like having all the right supplies, tools, etc. on hand before the hot and heavy part of the garden season starts. I hate having to leave the garden to go buy something that I should have sitting in the potting shed.