Lellie, I am not sure ..but it is my understanding that wild grown, no matter where, it protected. When nurseries propagate it from a seed, it is a different story... If you can, do contact a local orchid society. Tampa Orchid Club was once dealing with a similar situation - a big oak fell down on someone else's property, with a nice clump of E. tampensis...They - TOC folks - were asked to come out and help out with the plant. It is a beautiful plants! Good luck growing it, it is well worth it :) Olya

Jim Thomas of Biosphere Nursery says pawpaw won't live if they are dug up from the wild. He has to go to great lengths to get any to sell in his native collection. Don't know if it is because of an exceptionally long tap root, or what, but apparently digging them is a death sentence. They are getting very scarce in the wild, too, due to development of pine flatlands. And the scarcity impacts the numbers of zebra swallowtails seen in the wild these days, sadly. (Not zebra longwings, but the black and white zebra swallowtails.) Interesting that the pine hyacinth is a clematis. My native is a well-mannered vine that gets about 6 to 7 feet tall in my garden every year. It is just leafing out and heading up the trellis right now. I dearly love it. (Pics from last year.) I have several beautyberry volunteers in my yard, and love them. I'm not familiar with the arrowwood viburnum. Sounds interesting. One of my newest natives that I'm really starting to enjoy is a Simpson's Stopper. Have you seen them in the wild? I never have...or at least, never noticed them. But if you limb them up a bit, they can be grown like a crape myrtle, and the fluffy flowers (followed by edible orange fruits) are fun. Marcia

ditas, it's great to "see" you again! My Limelight is indeed early this year, with the warm temperature and plentiful rain fall earlier on (and now we have a drought! Sigh...). It's been a very strange spring!!! hydrangeasnohio, you noticed my Weigela My Monet too? I love that little shrub! it's so colorful and well-behaved, I got another one for another location last year too! It really brightens up any semi-shade spot. Yours is looking so healthy and lovely too! Regarding my Limelight, I pruned it very, very hard last year. It resulted in a less full shrub with lots of new canes and big blooms which flopped over a little bit after a rainstorm. This year, I decided to just selectively prune it, taking off some branches that were a bit unruly and crossing over other canes, and then just trimmed off the other ones. So far, I like the results - the shrub appears to be fuller and more uniform. Let's see how it will look when it blooms. I expect the blooms to be smaller, but that's OK because I think that when the blooms were too huge last year, they did look a little gawdy.... LOL. We shall see! :-)

Dorothy, I noticed the first one in bloom Wed. while walking the dog, but it is the only one I've seen so far. It has been so dry here for so long that the winter wildflower season is pretty poor so far, but I'm hoping the recent rainfall we received will help the spring wildflowers. It is too late, of course, for the wildflowers which typically sprout here in the fall and overwinter as small rosettes before resuming growth as winter temperatures warm up--they never sprouted back in the fall. That means we'll have our second "below average" wildflower season this year. Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) just started blooming in our yard Thurs., which is the same day that our "Jane" magnolia bloomed and our second plum tree began blooming too. It is sort of early for them, but we've had temperatures this past week in the 80s and even hit 90 degrees one day, so it is not surprising that everything is blooming. Now that the temps are colder, I bet the trees will slow down a little. Dawn