Hello All, I have been reading this thread with interest and fascination. Some of what I have to say is a day late and a dollar short, but opinion is that if I could not be assured of a label being true 95% of the time I would just as soon not have any label at all. Its better to knowingly have a no-name violet than to think I have a violet with the wrong name. It does not bother me that I cant go down to the local supermarket or Home Depot and buy a named violet. I havent been able to do that for years. It doesnt surprise me that massmarketing is not conducive to it. Because of this I have been buying named violets from specialty and mail-order stores as long as having named violets were important to me. Its nice to know now that there is a place to find named Optimaras. I have told the story before so for those of you who have already read it, my apologies. My introduction to violets was almost by accident. If it werent for my Grandmother I may never have grown them. I had always heard that they were difficult to grow. One day my grandmother told me if I were to take a leaf from her African violet and put it in a glass of water it would sprout roots and little plantlets.She was right and they did. The Violet had no name. I didn't care about names back then. In fact, I may not have realized that they had names. Soon I was asking people if I could have a leaf from their violets for me to propagate. No I dont have the origonally violet. I gave it away. I kick myself every time I think about it. But, getting back to my grandmother. She went to the grocery store and bought whatever violet happened to catch her fancy. She probably looked at them by color. I know that she liked the dark violet ones. The ones that we all think of when we think of an old-fashioned violet. She didnt care about names or anything like that. She just wanted something that looked good on her little table next to the window. She always had sheer curtains on the windows that she never opened and the violet would wither away after a few months. She would then throw it out, go to the grocery store and bring home another. I once grew a bunch of violets from seed. Without going into all of the gory details I had to get rid of them fast. I was going to physical therapy at the time. I boxed up all of the violets, brought them into the physical therapy place and gave all of them away. Nobody asked me anything about names. They were just happy to have a pretty violet. I really believe that my Grandmother was and many like her are the kind are customers that buy the majority of the African violets in this country. Some of these people in that majority group decide that they want to go to the next level, which includes having named violets. I am convinced that some would never have happened onto the next level had they not bought a no-name violet at the grocery store or had been given a gift of a violet from a friend. A little no name Violet started me in a hobby that has lasted for over 25 years. I am very grateful to my grandmother and that little violet for giving me so much joy. Larry

Thanks Will for your explaining in the way you see this. As you know I'm correcting conifer names here since day one I'm a member of this forum. From most of them it's not traceable who changed or misspelled these names, that's why I've to make the same corrections over and over again. I know I'm a straight talker but remember one thing: Most of the times it were the U.S. nurserymen who made these mistakes because of careless behaviour. Nobody here disagreed with them because they had in mind that these nurseryman had all the wisdom for these names. And then comes a young man from THE NETHERLANDS who's telling here what they're doing wrong. It's my opinion that this is not acceptable by several Americans here, and Dave is one of them because he's too proud to ask me for helping him (yet). Let me tell you this foreign guy is cleaning up the mess here which is created by Americans, and what do I get: A BIG MOUTH from fairfield and cococco, like they are the experts here, speaking about disrespectful. How much help did they provide here, the answer is NON. fairfield, at least I helped you out to pick the right understock for your new Pinus taeda brooms, remember, or do you've a short memory? Like said before, wrong spelled conifers couldn't be traced back in most of the times, but this time I can grab one by it's tail who's trying to fix the ACS database. No new mistakes will go in there. I'm willing to help him, but he has to ask me first and don't messing around by himself because that won't work. Another thing is "my high horse". Several times I showed pics here of my nursery and all the comments were very positive and some where whishing that I should open such nursery in the U.S. This can never happen because from my own experiences I can tell that nobody is so disciplinary as I'm in organizing things in the way I do. The same thing is my way of thinking in conifer names, it must be done in the right way or it shouldn't be done at all, but there's nothing for me in between. So what you're calling "high horse", is discipline for me. cococo, are you a word stutterer? It's very easy, it's just conifer... Fairfield, you must feel lucky that I made 3 U.S. nursery tours. I discovered all their dirty monkeyshines in which they're trying to fool you as buyers of their product... One of these is the false Picea sitchensis 'Bentham's Sunlight' which the Iseli Nursery is planning to sell to you American conifer buyers. I don't need no "thank you" for that, but I don't need a big mouth eiter! Well, that's it for now, I'm curious what kind of answers I'll get for this...

Honestly, we enjoy having a good natter about how bad EA's labels are, but it wouldn't affect anyone in this forum if a big box store labeled carnosa "he-man" and lacunosa "rainbow bright." In principal it's wrong, but in practice, they sell a zillion of about 10 different Hoya species & cultivars. At worst, someone who isn't interested in Hoyas will never know the real name of their plant⦠or someone who is interested in Hoyas will buy the same plant twice before they start educating themselves. I think we just talk about it because we enjoy feeling mock-outraged. ;) Not to say that labeling Hoyas wrong is no-big-deal, just that mislabeling carnosa is about as confusing as Brad Pitt showing up at a convention wearing Sean Penn's name tag. I mostly enjoy the existence of EA because they are the gateway drug into Hoyas. If they didn't exist, there would be fewer people who discovered Hoyas and joined the ranks of those who further our understanding of the best plants in the world. ;) And I'm pretty sure EA can continue to fulfill that purpose just as well run by Costa. Even if they cut a bunch of Hoya species, they'll keep KP/KQ, which are the two that 99.9999% of noobies show up here asking about. So, if carnosa still has the clout to get people in the door, that's all we need, as far as I'm concerned. I can't say I was that impressed by the status quo regarding survivability of the plants, their packaging, their distribution/availability, or anything like that, so things may even go uphill on those fronts.

I've about HAD IT around here guys! I haven't posted since the NEW & OBNOXIOUS advertising showed up right in the middle of the list of threads---AND---it started showing up right along with the replies in each thread--as if it was another reply! I think I may have finally hit my NO MORE limit! To me the ad in the middle of the list of threads put an automatic STOP on looking down the threads, and, I at least, was finding myself looking ONLY at the half a dozen threads ABOVE the advertising and never making it past the ad to the threads below it. I had posted above, in my reply to MamaSylvia, that you could "easily" just glance down the list of threads to check the dates and such, and with the ad in the middle that is in NO way easy to do anymore. ENOUGH! There are already BIG FlAsHiNg ads ALL OVER the place---not to mention the obnoxious IN-TEXT ads that you need to either take the time to "disable" or you risk ACCIDENTALLY mousing over them and suddenly having a BIG obnoxious box pop up that blocks what you're trying to read! Advertising is one thing, but iV seems, EVERY TIME, to come up with the most OBNOXIOUS and INTRUSIVE stuff in existence! I said above that when something like this happens we all rant about it and then "get over it," but if the "new" ads don't Go Away, I don't think I'm gonna get over this one! Having that ad breaking up the "flow" of the threads is just TOO intrusive as far as I'm concerned! Many of you probably don't remember this, but right after iV took over there were banner ads that couldn't be described as anything but por_ography!!! They had the "P-word" image flashing all over the top of the site! It was only when people started opting out and they weren't getting their CLICKS anymore that that garbage went away! They can post all the Garbage Advertising they want, but if the site isn't getting enough hits it's not doing them any good! NOW, having just said all that, I just pulled up the main RMG page on a separate screen--and for "right now" the New Nasty seems to be gone! I suspect it must have had something to do with the "script loading" problems many of you seem to have been having. I googled that and, yes, there are rants all over GW about it! There's no way they can try to stick all this Obnoxious Garbage in a site with such Obsolete Software and expect it to keep working! They want to just keep milking $$$ out of all the goodwill there is around here between the Gardeners who have come to know and like each other---without spending a penny on updating the site! I'm not having the "script" problem, and from the info on the search page below it looks like it's browser dependent. I use Safari, and that somehow seems to evade it! There are suggestions on some of the linked threads about how to TRY to stop it---but in my opinion, WE should not be the ones that are trying to fix it! Hopefully, with the disappearance of the new Obnoxious Advertising, the script loading problem will be fixed for all browsers, but I am still just about up to the hilt here! Even took some time trying to figure out if I could somehow start a separate forum JUST for Rocky Mountain Gardeners! With my feeble knowledge of computers, I'm not sure that's even a pipe dream, but I am TOTALLY fed up with this place right now--and if the "new ads" come back I may be gone! Skybird Here is a link that might be useful: GW script loading problems