Just read your trade list---WOW! I have nothing you specifically mention, but I sure wish you'd take a look at my list and LMK if there's anything I have that I can trade you for pretty much ANYTHING you list. (*grin*)I'd love to get cuttings from pretty much all your passies, if/when you cat them back for fall.

Did you ever get it to bloom? Mine blooms year round,..,starts about in June, and goes through Oct. It blooms off and on. I have mine in FULL SUN in south Fla. it is HOT I keep it dry. Frankly it looks sickly most of the time, But it blooms all year nearly. i dont feed it, I keep it root bound, and by the end of each year, when it looks next to dead, it puts out big new leaves, i cut them off and start all over. And it blooms the next spring/summer again. I feed it a few times. Then it gets the hot treatment! It makes the plant look horrible, BUT once I see buds starting, I soak it daily. It drains fast, so it is never wet. So...I dont have a nice old plant that gets dozens of blooms at a time, I get 1-3 blooms each month after June or so, till Oct-Nov. I suppose if i fed it and gave it more shade it would be a big old plant. BUT i dont know if it would bloom. So..you are way up north. Give it lots of direct sun, if you dont already, if you MUST feed it, give it bloom booster fertilizer, and get it potbound. Thats my 2 cents. Hope it works for you. I know it works for me. I got a variety called 'Mark Twain' a year ago, it is now just putting out the long long stiff stems, it is suppose to have an extra set of floral petals in the bloom, making it look like a double bloom. I saw the picture, and a tiny cutting cost me like $15! So I am hoping this spring/summer will give me blooms. It is just getting potbound now. If it does bloom with the 'double blooms' i will post the pictures of it, and make back my investment ! :) Hope this helps you. Sun/potbound/dry and keep it hungry. it works for mine, it has for over 30 years.

It's good to hear all is well. A bit chilly this morning, but well. Dawn, here's that Mark Twain quote in context. He was making a speech at the New England Society's Seventy-First Annual Dinner, New York City, Dec. 22, 1876. I love the part about the man with the weather collection who in the end, "not only had weather enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor." And the description of how radiant a tree looks covered in ice is so enticing that he's right; "One cannot make the words too strong." For your enjoyment, Mark Twain's New England weather speech. :^) "I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration -- and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours. It was I that made the fame and fortune of that man that had that marvelous collection of weather on exhibition at the Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners. He was going to travel all over the world and get specimens from all the climes. I said, "Don't you do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day." I told him what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity. Well, he came and he made his collection in four days. As to variety, why, he confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never heard of before. And as to quantity -- well, after he had picked out and discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not only had weather enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor. The people of New England are by nature patient and forbearing, but there are some things which they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets for writing about "Beautiful Spring." These are generally casual visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring. And so the first thing they know the opportunity to inquire how they feel has permanently gone by. Old Probabilities** has a mighty reputation for accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You take up the paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off what today's weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States, in the Wisconsin region. See him sail along in the joy and pride of his power till he gets to New England, and then see his tail drop. He doesn't know what the weather is going to be in New England. Well, he mulls over it, and by-and-by he gets out something about like this: Probably northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward and points between, high and low barometer swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning. Then he jots down his postscript from his wandering mind, to cover accidents. "But it is possible that the programme may be wholly changed in the mean time." Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of it -- a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the procession is going to move first. You fix up for the drought; you leave your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under, and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you know you get struck by lightning. These are great disappointments; but they can't be helped. The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-- Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there. And the thunder. When the thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape and saw, and key up the instruments for the performance, strangers say, "Why, what awful thunder you have here!" But when the baton is raised and the real concert begins, you'll find that stranger down in the cellar with his head in the ash-barrel. Now as to the size of the weather in New England -- lengthways, I mean. It is utterly disproportioned to the size of that little country. Half the time, when it is packed as full as it can stick, you will see that New England weather sticking out beyond the edges and projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring States. She can't hold a tenth part of her weather. You can see cracks all about where she has strained herself trying to do it. I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I will give but a single specimen. I like to hear rain on a tin roof. So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No, sir, skips it every time. Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to do honor to the New England weather -- no language could do it justice. But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you please, effects produced by it) which we residents would not like to part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries -- the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top -- ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold -- the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong."

Goodmorning Everybody ! :) I heard from my swappers last night...:))) Mariann I have a couple of surprizes for you...We love putting surprizes in our boxes Regina started it.. Chell you are so creative and your writing is so much fun to read... I bet the boys loved playing pirate.. I can see their smiling faces now...What a great idea to make a hideout.. They will always remeber their hideout mom made for them... Norma I havent traded with you but I am sure you went way above in sending her nice cuttings..I seen pics of what you send...They are awesome boxes..:)) Please dont be sad..:)) Regina howdy :) I am so sorry about Mark having to have surgery and the heart condition would just send me into heaven.. Wow I am so glad to read it all went well...Shooo My heart sank for a minute...He will be all healed for college this fall..:)) You empty nester dont go through what I went through...Stay busy and call them alot... I miss my kids so much it hurts sometimes... Dogs are okay but they cant replace our true babies...I love reading about chell and her boys... It makes me smile so much... Frances lol You poor gardener..ahhah You need a break from mother nature..Really..:)) Oh big snakes yucky... I would be screaming... I love chippies...They are so cute...Havent had many around with a cat now...Kiki has brought home two gardener snakes...He was very proud of himself... Yesterday I was getting ready to go out and play in the dirt...The crows or blackbirds were screaming...It just like a scene in the movie the "birds"... It creeped me out really bad...I couldnt see what they were yelling at.. I watched tv...Than got bored and went coleus shopping..lol The master gardener sale for the next county over is tommorow... I cant wait to see what they are going to be offering..I have never been to this one...Oh I almost forgot..I heard from the master gardener I met...Looks like we are building another gh..lol She wants to do it closer to fall since everyone is busy with their gardens...I am glad we could help her..They are a pain to build.. well I gabbed enough lol must be the strong coffee and I got a lot of sleep...:)) Have a good day everybody..Barb