Creme de Cassis Dahlia is starting to open.

jim, are you or did you visit Pompeii or Herculaneum?

Annie, is that a Limelight? I measured one of mine the other day. It was at least 10 ft. high and 14 ft. wide. Probably wider now after some very heavy rains. I love the paniculatas.

Summer, that's a fabulous dahlia!

Alisande, it's listed as a Pee Gee tree hydrangea...whatever that means...probably a limelight but I have no idea. My landscape designer selected and planted it.

Were all those jugs found at Pompeii? They are not plaster-formed like the body?

In a hanging flower pot on Daughter's porch.

Alisande, it is a tree...you can see it better here when it was younger. I prune it back hard every fall, but it gets so overloaded that it looks more like a bush in full bloom.

Annie, maybe that is what they call a standard.

The body in the case is a real body covered with dried lava.

My new limelight is doing great. The blossoms are so heavy that the branches are bowed. I had to hold this one up.

Oh my goodness those hydrangea are beautiful. I love hydrangea. My grandmother had huge bushes of them all surrounding the farm house. All colors. They are one of my favorite flowers. I tried to grow them at my previous, flood, house with no luck. It is so hot and dry here. But I have a beautiful established one here at the new house. The original owner was clever. She planted it right where the AC unit drips water out. So it is getting a constant drip of water. Thank you for sharing yours with us!

Okay, I have to join the hydrangea fan club. The large ones are my two Limelights--at least 10 feet tall, and lots wider. The smaller one is Little Lamb. I don't recommend it, as the stems are weak and the "lambs" usually end up sleeping on the ground at some point during the summer.

I don't think I've posted these pics before. I meant to, but the camera I used died and I just put its card in another camera today.

Thanks, Alisande. I want to join the hydrangea fan club. One of my limelight.

I don't know what the name of my hydrangea is. I got it from Kroger a number of years ago. I only got flowers when I moved it from one spot to a new spot in my garden.

My oak leaf hydrangea had a little visitor in this picture.

Thank you for helping to identify my hydrangea. I have never seen a tree hydrangea and thought I was buying something similar to the other hydrangea (oakleaf) I already had (hence planting it so close to the house). Every year, this thing just keeps getting bigger and bigger. They can't be very common in our zone 3 city, because everyone stops and comments on it.

Socks- Hi, I hope that you are well. I don’t know where the found all the jugs, they have A LOT of them. Pompeii was very interesting. They have a large red light district with unusual street markers leading the way to that part of town.

I've never been but have been fascinated with Pompeii and Herculaneum from a young age. The "bodies" are casts. Corpses decayed and left hollows in the lava, which were then filled with plaster by their discoverers, creating a cast.The amphorae, the jug-like containers, were found either in tact or in pieces. It's all very interesting.

However for some years there has been fear that the site is deteriorating more and more and work to restore is slow and expensive. Herculaneum is said to be better preserved.

ETA: I should have said "ash" not lava. I just now remembered the term. ha

Hi Schoolhouse_gw - I was surprised at how large Pompeii is. I would have like to have seen Herculaneum too. It was a long day, the day we went and my phone died, I wish I had more pictures. We were blessed with good weather and since we arrived so late it was almost empty. I hope that you go! It’s interesting to see how they lived in their homes, they had a water collection system with pipes and public fountains. The red light area was fascinating as they have small rooms with pictures of different things a person could purchase above each small room. Our guide told us that many foreign travelers couldn’t speak the language so they would just point to the picture.

I've read so many books and watched so many documentaries over the years I feel like I've been there. But I know it could never match the actual thrill of standing on a street in Pompeii and seeing all those things I've read about. It has always been on my bucket list. As I mentioned, there is some urgency I feel because the site may not be available for future generations to enjoy.

Something that surprised me is that there isn’t almost any security. It’s such a treasure. We talked to our guide about the lack of security and she told us that Italy doesn’t do a good job of securing it’s treasures for future generations to enjoy. There is a place that has bones under glass. Our guide told us the bones were of a thief.