hey!!! you keep coming back.. so you must want some learnin .... lets start class ... first ... the adage "first year they sleep, second crawl, third leap' is usually applied to hosta.. and i suppose.. a lot of larger perennials... i cant recall ever hearing it applied to shrubs ...but i suppose its possible ... now.. as to flowers ....lets set this in a time line ... setting aside all transplant issues .... the shrub flowers ... mostly in spring with shrubs.. with a few exceptions... then usually they take about a 3?? month siesta of growing leaves and storing energy ... how this all goes depends on the ambient weather at this time ... sometime in summer.. they start to SET buds for the next year .. again.. this development is weather dependent ... think about a severe hail storm decimating the new buds ... and dont forget drought ... and then fall comes.. and they prepare for winter.. and again.. it is weather dependent .... think about severe drought in aug/sept/oct ... then.. perhaps you decided to love you plant to death.. and somehow justified them needing food late in the fall ... throwing on gobs of fertilizer late in the season ... and then a hard frost or freeze hits.. and instead of having cycled down.. or hardened off to winter ... your FED plants were in fast vegetative growth.. and suffered severe frost freeze damage ... plus the drought.. plus the hailstorms ... throw all of winter on top of that.. lol .. including any severe temps not only cold... which yours should take.. but even prolonged warm spikes when it is supposed to be winter ... now.. all that said.. can you understand why for the life of us.. we most likely can not tell you why you had fewer flowers this year ... why dont you .. pop quiz.. lol ...wrap your head around the theory.. and you try to recall the weather since bud development occurred last year .. and speculate as to which vagary of mother nature.. severely impacted flowering ... we will grade you on a curve.. so dont worry about that .. as they said in law school: DISCUSS AND DECIDE .... blue books open... be back in an hour to collect your thoughts.. lol have a great day ... ken

Ken, both these pines are wrongly written. Pinus parviflora 'Arnold's Arboretum Dwarf' Must bin written as 'Arnold Arboretum Dwarf'. Pinus peuce 'Variegated' Must bin written as 'Aureovariegata' Your parviflora also lost a lot of needles which will give it another appaerence as it should have... Compare it with the one at the Bizon Nursery pics. Here is a link that might be useful: 'Arnold Arboretum Dwarf'

There are also a couple of good one-session talks being done by Claire Sawyers, of the Scott Arboretum (outside Philly). She wrote "The Authentic Garden" and is talking about that and doing a second talk titled "Genius Loci: Using Native Plants to Emphasize Garden Context" on Thursday evening and Friday morninjg, Jan 29 & 30.

I just received the latest Plant Delights Nursery January 24, 2011 E-Newsletter and in it Tony Avent has a different take on the azalea issue (scroll about half way down), i.e. "There has recently been a big uproar in the nation's capital over a plan by the US National Arboretum to remove a section of the Glen Dale azalea display. Azaleas lovers across the country have launched an email campaign to prevent the arboretum staff from removing the azaleas. While I like azaleas as much as anyone, I have a different take on the issue. The azaleas in question are breeding rejects from the USDA program which produced the Glen Dale Series. The breeding work of the late Arboretum director, Ben Morrison, produced the release of 454 azalea cultivars. Do we really need more azaleas from a program that has yielded 454 named varieties? When most breeding programs are concluded, the culls (rejects) are typically discarded. For some reason, these culls were never discarded, and over the years folks have become emotionally attached to these plants and consequently are now protesting the plan to discard them. The land at the US National Arboretum is some of the most expensive land in the country and is not the place to maintain a collection of cull azaleas...no matter how nice they look for a couple of weeks in spring. My suggestion to concerned members of the Rhododendron Society and the general public is that they raise private money and pay for the plants to be moved to a nearby park, which has more space and is in an area which is not focused on genetically important collections. Perhaps then, the USNA can replant a complete, labeled collection of the named Glen Dale hybrids along with other important hybrids that can serve as a real reference collection instead of the mass of unlabeled, unnamed plants that exist there now. " It's a valid point. Claire