Ahhhhhh :)! I am putting my feet up for a moment now! Visited Carol in Joshua this morning and enjoyed the visit SO much. Carol's gardens are so welcoming and pretty, she has put a ton of work into it. Thank you, Carol for all of the wonderful plants. It looks like everything made it home fine. Even the 4 foot tall Indigo Spires, lol! I have a perfect spot in mind for it at the project site. It will be beautiful. After seeing your gardens, my want list has increased considerably....but not for the project, LOL I mean for me :). Your place makes me impatient for some shade at my place. I love the high, high canopy of your trees. Anyhow, one of my projects for tomorrow is to organize all of the potted up stuff I have here for the project in order of height :). Then I'm going to take a pic and post it. You guys will not believe your own generosity! I feel like I have a mini-nursery :). I am so looking forward to getting it all in the ground. I have used potting soil with fert in it so everything is looking really nice and I have every pot mulched for that little bit of protection. They all get a good drink every morning and seem to be happy. I know the master gardeners are not going to believe their eyes when I deliver all of these plants :). I know I've said it before, but thank you again everyone for your incredible generosity and caring. This garden can't help but be a huge success. Kristi

Marti, my Shasta daisies look wilted too, but they're getting ready to die back for the winter anyway; just dig up the pitiful-looking plant, & the new owner will plant it, & the roots will send up a new crown in the spring. I have a few daisies that have given up the ghost, & the new crowns have emerged already! Remy, if you have enough of the lotion and/or shampoo if that's what it is (bad monitor, bad bad monitor!), I'd like to trade...something? anything? I did pot up another rose for you, looks like another, or maybe the same, China rose, but it's a freebie; it's a leetle feller & its leaves are yellow, don't know if something's wrong with it or if it's just going dormant early. I did find some red yucca seeds from this year & some bur oak acorns from 2012; I had hoped to grow a bur oak, but I can't keep the squirrels out of them!

Bressler, Thanks for confirming the Mexican honeysuckle is a slow starter. Had no idea and didn't want to leave it languishing for another year if poor placement was the cause. They're not seen growing or sold around Dallas much, so suspect it may be marginal during the worst of our cold/wet/clay combinations. Puppy definitely killed a smaller Texas star hibiscus by pulling the root ball out of the ground after a rain. I didn't find it in her hiding spot until after it was too torn up and dried out to replant. She also chewed the stems off of a larger one and it is showing no signs of life yet: We don't usually trim them until new growth starts because the stems have hollow cores and had read somewhere there's a greater chance of rot or freeze damage if water is able to enter over the winter (true???). Will give it more time, but our other two put up new shoots weeks ago. Pkponder, Puppy is actually pretty good about not chewing most things she shouldn't. She'll most often grab something just fallen out of a tree or that I've recently pruned off. However, she cannot seem to resist tall thin stems like hibiscus... so good chance she would also go after the pond cypress if able. Am pretty certain this chewing phase will pass, then we too will be left with just the occasional "impact damage". Baptisia seems to do okay in partial shade, but does appear to do better with 5+ hours of sun. Most likely reason ours had stayed so small was the adjacent Turk's caps had gotten so large I had trouble keeping them from shading the Baptisia from late June until first freeze. Roselee, Will look forward to Mexican honeysuckle eventually taking off if it proves to be root hardy this far north. It's funny to watch how the puppy can make her older, and usually sedate, dog visitors so rambunctious. A year, two maybe, before this winds down and then we MIGHT even miss it. Here she is with a piece of mulberry root retrieved from the compost pile for chewing..... a cage for the compost is in the works ;-)

No, we didn't flood....don't flood here usually. The flood following Harvey was the only time we've had water on the property. Harvey didn't cause us to flood....it was after it went out, turned around and came back and stalled out....did we flood.............but, we got almost five inches of rain, and that is very disheartening when I want the mud to dry up so we can get some decent pics of the place. So sorry you got water in your sun room. I hope it is an easy fix. I understand your stress. I have got to the point that I would almost prefer to move to the desert than deal with this constant rain. I was looking at the radar map and see what PKponder said about rain missing them. It went off to the south east. It never misses us though. :( The bayou is up and running fast though. We sold some land behind us, and the owner built a 2 acre pond, and a really nice dam. We can hear the water going over the dam....really loud. We walked back there to check on a beaver that has taken up residence in that pond. He has added some to the cement dam that is there. We get quite a kick out of him. I don't know if the owner even knows the beaver is back there, since he has his lodge on the side that connects to our pasture. I read a little about them....they eat bark, so he isn't hurting anything. Amazing how big a tree they can gnaw down. He is taking down trees on my side, which is okay with me.