I am really enjoying this discussion! Rosefolly, again, passion. Yes, if you really long for alpines, I certainly wouldn't tell you not to grow them. Gardening is about passion, after all! It's always up to the individual gardener to decide how much he/she wants to invest in growing a given plant, and what degree of success will be satisfactory. My own tendency, which is partly philosophical and partly temperamental, is to try to adapt myself to my conditions. I'll dig and mulch and weed and water at the start, and I site plants with great care, but I won't go much further, with irrigation systems or winter protection, for example. My garden philosophy isn't everybody's, though, and there's no reason it should be. Part of my joy is meeting the challenge of adaptation; another gardener's might be the challenge of impossible conditions. I heartily agree that the garden will be a mishmash if there are no restraints. This thread is, after all, titled 'The Value of Limits'. Ornamental gardening has an aesthetic component, to utter a tautology. Regardless of what the gardener grows, to make a beautiful garden she/he has to consider plant textures and architecture, bulks and empty spaces, colors, light and shade. I tend to think that respecting the environmental limitations of a site will tend to produce a more stylistically coherent garden. The assemblage of plants will seem more 'natural' because they're plants whose relatives would be found growing together in nature. When I started this thread I didn't link the title well with the content. What I was trying to say was that by respecting the basic ecological character of a garden site and trying to work with it, the resulting garden would be more individualistic, and at the same time more coherent, than if it were subjected purely to the workings of the author's own imagination and desires. Nature as collaborator, not as enemy! "I agree in landscaping there is too much repetition, but my garden is my own and I couldn't care less whether it resembles someone elses, it's my experience/experiment and not for others' amusement."--greenwitch YES!!! I suspect this is the only way to have an original garden--to not care whether it's like or unlike anyone else's. I totally agree. I also don't care whether a plant is rare or common (though I can get sick of a plant I see grossly overused), just whether it works in my garden and is beautiful. And I don't care about what's fashionable in gardening. Ha. The only value to fashion, that I've ever seen, is that it brings plants into the nurseries that weren't there before, that might be useful. Gray-leaved aromatic plants are ever welcome in my garden, and ornamental grasses not, no matter what the dernier cri may be. Well, okay, fashion offers new suggestions of beauty, to add to my mental catalog, and perhaps I'll profit from the suggestions one day. Anyway, greenwitch, I think what you say is exactly right and very important. I do have two blueberries in an old bathtub. I know I can grow anything is a container, but plants in containers are too vulnerable for me to be comfortable with the situation, except for my succulents. By the way, on the subject of 'banal' (my word) plants--no plant is banal if the gardener is in love with it. robiniaquest: I have an Italian friend whose hobby is old fruit trees, and who loves figs. He says that figs are hardier than they're often given credit for in the U.S., but that gardeners in the States make the mistake of generously fertilizing and watering their figs and so the trees make a lot of succulent growth and then freeze in the winter. As you say, anyone who wants to grow plants that are a little tender for their zone, or in need of some extra warmth, needs to know how to take advantage of a wall. Even here my rosemary likes to have a wall to lean against or a masonry pillar to wrap itself around, and I overwinter my potted succulents in a cool greenhouse rigged up against the southfacing wall of our house. My neighbors have a rosemary planted against the west-facing masonry wall of an outbuilding (in this orientation it's also sheltered from the cold winds, which come from the east), and it must be the biggest plant of rosemary I've ever seen. A protective wall and decent drainage would probably help your fig project, too: how is your tree placed? Melissa

In October, I yanked a Coffeecake persimmon out of the ground after 8 months and no bud break only to find an extensive and beautiful root system. I quickly did some trimming and put it in a pot and put another Coffeecake bareroot I just bought and I had ready in its place. The new one actually broke dormancy and did rather well within a few weeks. I went inside to find out WTF! And a Google search turned up that persimmons need a certain number of HEAT hours to break dormancy. I'm guessing wherever the first persimmon was from did not get sufficient heat hours (but its replacement did) before it just gets too hot here to grow, because the original sprouted leaves and branched out nicely a few weeks after transplant to the pot. Here is a link that might be useful: persimmons and heat units

Mimi, your pork looks perfect. Neely, I love the look of your tuna salad. So refreshing. Annie, I'm so sorry about your yorkshires. Mine have never flubbed like that. As mentioned, maybe the batter was too cold. We had spaghetti and meatballs yesterday for New Years, and my goal was to have the more "fancy" dinner today. I'm not a clam virgin any longer. I never cook seafood, and today was my first foray cooking clams. I just try not to think of them being alive :-( This is a Portuguese dish, and one that I wanted to christen our new Lodge cast iron skillet, one of or presents to ourselves. Chicken, sausage, potatoes, roasted red peppers, garlic, onions, clams and kale. I used baby kale, and added some white wine for additional flavour. Sopped up with homemade rolls and it's truly a keeper.

We have a huge mosquito invasion here. Hordes of them hang around just outside all our exterior doors just waiting for us to walk out the door, and every time a person, dog or cat goes in or out, the mosquitoes try to fly inside. Hunting them down indoors and killing them if they make it indoors is very tedious. It is the same thing when you get into the car---the mosquitoes fly in with you. Many counties near us, mostly on the TX side of the river, are reporting positive findings of West Nile in mosquitoes caught in traps. Fort Worth has had 200 mosquitoes test positive for West Nile in recent days. Some cities have begun spray programs. Y'all be careful around all these mosquitoes. I assume that with this many mosquitoes active and testing positive for West Nile, we likely will start hearing about human cases of West Nile soon. Tim and I suddenly have wasps---three new, big wasp nests have appeared on the house this week. He sprayed those with a wasp spray just around sunset yesterday and will spray again this evening if any wasps still are on/in the nests. I imagine the cooler weather explains the sudden appearance of the wasps and the building of nests on the house. We had wasps around all summer and just ignored them because they are very beneficial insects to have as many prey on caterpillars, but they weren't around the house much in the hot summer months, and they weren't building nests attached to the house. We won't even mention the huge fire ant mounds popping up everywhere, other than to say they are here. There's tons of grasshoppers still, and we also still have stink bugs and this week I am seeing a few squash bugs. Y'all know that squash bugs will feed on Halloween pumpkins and decorative pumpkins you have sitting outside for autumn decorations right? I watch for them and try to kill them when I see them there. Any that escape death will overwinter and be the start of next year's squash bug problem. Back in the summer months I got tired of weeding the asparagus bed, so cut back the asparagus really hard and sowed a ton of leftover flower seeds into that bed. I figured if weeds were going to grow mixed in with my asparagus plants, they might as well be the weeds of my choosing. So, in the asparagus bed we now have a lot of plants in bloom: cosmos, the grain type amaranths, Nicotiana alata, daturas, Laura Bush petunias, zinnias, rose moss and more. I'm sure there's weeds in there as well but you really cannot see them because of all the pretty flowers in bloom. The asparagus grew back of course. Nothing kills asparagus. The seeds I tossed into the asparagus bed were slow to sprout and grow because we were in drought, but the plants are doing great now. That is a good thing as many of the summer bloomers that have been growing in the garden since March or April are worn out and dying back or going to seed, but that one long asparagus bed is full of fresh fall blooms. Many of the zinnias I planted in the spring are rapidly declining now after this latest couple of inches of rain that fell this week. The soil is just too wet for them now, but at the same time, a few small zinnias that sprouted in the mulch in adjacent pathways are getting ready to bloom. I'm glad I left them in the pathways when I saw they had sprouted there. Usually I immediately yank out anything that sprouts in the mulch, but I can't yank out baby zinnias in August because I know the older ones are tired out and worn out and declining. Some of the pineapple sage plants are in the same condition of decline---they like well-drained soil, but I have a total of 9 pineapple sage plants, which means we still have plenty in bloom because only a couple have died. I believe the monarchs are migrating through here now. We had tons of them nectaring yesterday and most are flying south. Some are flying southwest, which also is fairly typical here at this time of the year. Some of the males are puddling. All in all, there's still a whole lot going on outdoors even as the season is winding down. The most amazing garden survivor is 2 or 3 flat-leaf parsley plants that somehow survived all the heat and drought (not bad for cool-season plants in a 100+-degree summer, growing in full sun), followed by purple datura volunteers that sprouted in August and are getting ready to bloom in the next few days. The fall tomato plants still don't have much fruit on them, likely because we stayed in the 90s very deeply into September so it won't be a great fall tomato year here, but the SunGold I put in the ground in March still is producing so at least there's that. So many morning glories, mostly Grandpa Ott's, sprouted and started growing along the fenceline in late summer that they are beginning to shade the pineapple sage, Russian sage and purple daturas, so I spent some time last evening yanking out a bunch of them. With sunlight/day length becoming increasingly limited as we go more deeply into autumn, I want for the flowers in the border along the driveway to not have their sunlight blocked by aggressive, weedy MGs. Today's task will be to cut back four o'clocks that are growing through the western fence and shading my peony plants and adjacent container plants. If only the four o'clocks would stay where they are supposed to grow outside the garden fence, but four o'clocks ignore boundaries. It is all fun and games out in the garden later today, at least until I encounter a snake of any kind. Then, the party will be over. Dawn