It is really hard to tell when it is dead as far as the main branches as they get so knarly and corky to the touch. I don't ever trim my back cause I am never sure what is old wood and whats new. I have finally learned to scrap the wood and most of the time it is green underneath. This one section that I think died also was originally planted on my fenceline. Now there is a second fence up against mine and I can't get to the area to pull weeds (shucks!) so who knows if it got broken off at the bottom or not. I just know the top leaves got burnt from the frost we had. I am always scattering seed along the fenceline so it has started to fill in and as I said, I have tons of it everywhere else. It is a great vine for Polydamus Swallowtails and I love to watch them in the mornings. They nest up in my Crape Myrtles and between 9:00 and 9:20, they start flittering out of the trees. They chase each other around all morning and it is like a racetrack in the sky, trying to follow them. Just makes me smile!

I've got a ground rat (chipmunk) who's decided the new Iris bed I made last fall is a good place to make a new series of tunnels. I was hoping they were just "trial holes" but he disappeared into one hole and didn't come back up from that hole. This may be a stupid question but I'll ask anyway since I had to hack out clay soil and competing roots with an ax for days to make this bed. Will these chipmunk tunnels damage the Bearded Iris roots and, if so, far enough to kill them off? Do chipmunks nibble at the roots? The roots on these Iris aren't extensive yet since they were just divided last Fall. These miserable little "rats" already tunneled right for the Daffs I transplanted in Spring and my funky but delicate Allium Bulgaricum. The Bearded Iris are from stock well over 60 years old and I don't want to lose them to chipmunks who I used to think were cute until their population exploded this year. My father has many, many more that he's having extracted from weed infested landscape cloth in the next few weeks so I'm going to be dividing and replanting LOTS of these plants since they haven't been divided in almost 25 years. Needless to say, I asked him to have it done last fall so there wouldn't be so many thirsty/feisty critters about at that time who didn't have other fallen bird foods to satisfy them. It's not my house...I'm just the gardener... LOL. The critter problem is taking up a lot of time and plant material this year. If it's not deer, rabbits, groundhogs above ground then it's moles and chipmunks below ground. Sometimes I think it's just my bad planting, arranging, selection or protection until I read a thread like this and see most people have critter problems of one kind or another unless they have an entirely double fenced piece of land. Deer and rabbit resistant plant lists are a mean joke on new gardeners. Squirrels aren't getting much food from me right now since I had to stop ground feeding birds because chipmunks were taking it all. Maybe I haven't had a problem with them in the past since they had enough "hard stuff" with corn to file down their incisors when planting fall bulbs. I can only dream of having Lilies. Deer decimate them. The rabbits have eaten the gladiolus foliage in 2 new beds. Another case of my wanting to strangle them after having to take an ax to cement clay soil to plant bulbs...LOL.

Irene yes. The same plant. I wanted to document the buds in case it ever bloomed! Yep, smart weed barrier -- I wish. LOL It's just that there's not many weed seeds around to germinate. A few weed seeds blow in, but they are pulled as quickly as they are seen. That's the beauty of being retired. One has time to do stuff like that. That's a good quote and could be interpreted a couple of ways ... :-). By the way, I separated the family of cats and distributed them around to other pipe vines so they wouldn't run out of food and have to crawl around looking for it.

I feel for you bpath. They can be such little stinks. Some of by cats never scratched a thing, but into adorable Siamese tore into everything. I tried catnip on scratch posts, catnip on cardboard -- you name it. I see a couple of solutions. Along the artsy lines, you could take some strands of yarn and attach them to a sort of header to hold them together and then I fix that to the areas that are already gobstoppers (I spoke the word gouged up, but out came gob stoppers – whatever they are). Then the cats can just enjoy the rest of their days playing with already cut sections of yarn and he could be a conversation piece. Yes, another conversation piece. Or you can take something like plaster of Paris or wax and form a sort of shell over that area - like a cast, but in color. You can paint it or add different colors of wax or clay. I just saw one of these amaryllis bulbs in a clay-like "pot" molded over the bulb. It looked great. I bet something like that could actually look kind of cool along the edge of your couch -- like a molded pottery patch. Then there is another solution.