My Fireworks has been slow growing up to this point; it's been in the ground 3-4 years. Maybe someone else can speak about the size of Fireworks in their garden. The Jackmanii has viticella parentage, so it can get large, quickly. Some of us in the colder zones are experimenting with cutting back group 2's after the first flush, hoping to get a 2nd, but some of mine never stop blooming. Early tests seems to point to our growing season being too short to get rebloom on most(?) group 2's but people have had success. You should experiment in your own garden. Some of my group 2's are still blooming well. Don't cut back group 3's. By the time most of them have finished blooming, it will be close to fall. I don'think there is anything to gain, and the green vine and the interesting seedheads looks nicer than a bare arbor, but that is just my opinion. Although there isn't good information on how beneficial deadheading clematis is, it won't hurt and perhaps it will help produce more blooms. I prune my group 3's by half in late fall as soon as the plant is dormant, then do the final pruning in early spring.

Thanks everyone. I miss you too, but thank the stars that my DH brought his laptop and we can get a connection. We are here with my DH's parents and sister and hubby and their 2 teenager kids. Our room is on the third floor and that just happens to be the only level in this house that we can get a connect. (happy me!) The ocean here is not bathtub warm, but it is warm. Feels cool, but you can just go right in with having to get used to the temp, no matter how hot it is. Feels cooler at night but still not chilly by any means. It seems much saltier to me than the Pacific...maybe because this is an inlet...dunno. Is the Atlantic saltier? Body buoyancy is much greater as a result (or could it be that my increased body fat just makes me float like a cork?----hmmmm. :) They are shooting fireworks again. The Garden City pier is 1.7 miles northeast of our beach house. A nice walk that I have become accustomed to doing every morning. The first day, it was all I could do to climb the stairs every day. I thought I would die from lack of air! I took it a little at a time, and walked a bit further each day and swam out a bit farther each day. Now I am able to comfortably stroll down the beach every morning and having a blast in the surf. At low tide every morning around 5:30, I go out and comb the beach for shells and things. Most of the shells are broken, but some manage to make shore intact. The moonstones are lovely - tumbled pieces of shell or quartz, about half the size of a dime. So lovely. I am finding black shells, which I had never before seen. Found a piece of branch coral yesterday. That is very rare in the inlet. There were some guys on the beach this morning that had been finding tiny shark's teeth. They gave me one - the best one they had. Very cool! I am enjoying the children on the beach. they are so cute to watch and delightful to chat with. The Legend of Captain Jack is one that is famous around here. I asked two little kids this morning who were sitting at the shore digging if they had found any of Jack's treasure yet. They looked up with complete earnest and said, "Nope, not yet". I said, "Me neither. Darn." they bobbed their heads in complete agreement of my sentiments. I asked them if they were searching for buried treasure and they looked up and beamed, "Ya!" "Have you found any yet?" "Nah, but we think these might be broken pieces. Not sure" They held up little black pointed slivers of something, and I could for certain say whether they were or were not pieces of shark teeth, but I suspect they were in all actuality slivers of black oyster shells and not shark's teeth at all....but I was not going to spoil their enthusiasm and fun. Darling little sprouts they were of about 5 or 6. ((HUGS)) ~ Annie Down here with some sorry "sunny beaches", but having a great time in spite of it all.

Thank you so much Krista! Yes, I just love Anna de Diesbach! It's so strange that here I am dreading white in my Garden and here is Penny Lane teaching me to sit down and Shut Up, lol! It is fast becoming one of my favorite roses. Tammy, once you've been involved in Agility, you will be probably like the rest of the Agility folks, ADDICTED, haha! And the dogs have sooo much fun. Life will never be the same, and no, agility dogs will not be jumping over the fence. They will always love their "Puppy School" and can immediately distinguish Puppy School from the plain and boring fence which they'll just ignore, lol! I Promise You This, lol! I'm a bit jealous that you are in Tennessee. Much more opportunities to go to several trials. Kansans have to travel very, very far to get enough trials to compete, but we've got some totally Awesome World Class competitors here. One Kansan even won 1st place in one of the International European Competitions this year. And there are others who regularly make it to World International Team competitions. Must be in the water that Kansans drink, hahaha! Eluane and I can only win through Lord-Blessed Miracles. We only compete 4-5x a year; it's all we can afford. Almost all dog agility folks in Kansas compete in other venues, not just AKC, and they will travel several hundreds of miles as well so they average about 24 trials at the very minimum per year. They also attend classes, seminars from famous handlers. I've been a freelancer/unemployed for over 2 years so we've only taken one class total, lol! So we do the best that we can and count on the Good Lord to carry us the rest of the way, haha! We do have a club membership so we can still practice on our own once a week, so that is good! But not having an instructor is a huge!!!!! problem. You really need classes to do well in agility. I have to depend on my friends in England for advice and we've already made many critical mistakes in trying to do training on our own.... Our training has been experiment after experiment... The rosette is from our Hardest Level, Excellent AKC Jumpers and the course was challenging. We're still stuck in Open though for Standard. We need 2 more wins to get to Excellent :) We also got a very late start in agility. Eluane began at 4.5 years and now she just turned 6 which is "ancient" compared to the fast younger dogs. That's like running a 42 year old compared to a dog in its prime 20 year old range so not much time left for us. But it's still so fun and rewarding and we take the Moments of Grace in our time and stride!

Few flowers smell as good as Stargazers. You can smell them from one end of the garden to the other! You have some different Siloams. Very nice. Love the yellow seedling. Kate