Keeping a dawn redwood inside during the winter is a very bad idea for two reasons...first, without winter dormancy induced by change in photoperiod and especially temperature, your d.r. will simply stop grwing around january and begin to look sick and ugly. You can remedy this by throwing it in the fridge for three weeks once it has stopped growing, and then taking it out and placing in a sunny window. If it is already dormant, it will need a good three to four eeks of cold temps and low light levels. However, experience dictates that unless you have a brightly lit greenhouse or expensive sodium light, than growth indoors, with low indoor light conditions (even a bright sunny south facing window is still pretty low on light energy required for growth, light drastically tapers off as distance from the window increases) is always going to be far inferior and unhealthy looking to full bodied light outside. The seedling will only grow on the side that faces the window, will be weak and leggy and more susceptible to croaking in the first year, etc. My advice is to just plant it out, mulch, maybe some grate fencing, and wait for spring. Then water non stop. It is IMPOSSIBLE to overwater this species and it will thank you for it.

YOU SAY THE ANNUAL PLANT SALE IS SAT> 4/17....that date is a SUNDAY. You should re-post with correct date for us please

I forgot to add that when posting photos on forums or emailing to friends, it isn't the size of the photo in INCHES that matters as much as the file size. In other words, a photo that appears to be say 5" x 7" on your monitor may actually be a smaller file size (and therefore upload quicker) than one that appears to be 4" x 5" or smaller. That's because file size has to do more with resolution and the like than it does with the actual visible size of the photo. That's where the compression comes in. I don't believe Photobucket compresses images when it resizes them. (It didn't used to, anyway.) So you might be posting a smaller picture (from a viewing standpoint) that is till very high in file size and very slow to upload, if you aren't careful. I take my digital photos at a fairly high resolution in case I want to print them. But when I resize for posting, I compress them way down so they might go from over a million bytes to 50,00 bytes, or the like. It makes a huge difference, and is one other thing I like to do myself to be sure the photos don't bog everything down too much. And one last thing...photos that look HUGE one one monitor (maybe even larger than the actual screen) may be much smaller on another one. The size of the monitor and the settings on it will make it very different from computer to computer. It's impossible, of course, to post photos that will look good on everyone's monitor, so you try to find something not too far to either extreme, in order to have it look good on the most monitors you can. Often times photos that are posted on GW show up on my monitor somewhere between a wallet-sized photo and a postage stamp. Seriously. I've seen them the size of typical thumbnails, only it was the whole photo. I'm sure it looked different to the person posting, but when they are that small, detail is lost to many of us. Just something to keep in mind when you see some photos come through that look huge on your monitor and others that look tiny. It probably looks very different to the person who posted. And now back to the tree ID's....any more comments on what Bill is trying to identify? I think everyone is in agreement on the dwarf poinciana, but there seem to be different opinions on the others. Marcia

i have seen some recent pics from the garden district and uptown areas and the loss of hundred+ year old oaks is pretty sad. also, one of my friends is a keeper at the zoo. while they lost their running water on thursday, they are still in high spirits and all of the animals are okay. they are faring better than people in some other parts of the city. gardenelf