Thanks everyone for your kind comments. My favorite is also Wild Horses. That is a wonderful daylily. Every bloom opens perfect. The Divine Comfort and Antique Rose are FFOs. They actually look better in picture than in person.

Thanks for your comments, everyone. Debra, Thanks for your comment on my UFO seedling. That gives me a little more confidence to hang on to it at least one more year. Rita, Siloma Cinderella is one of the few DLs that give me re-bloom in this harsh climate. But only if we get lots of rain in Aug. and Sept. (which happened last year.) This year, well, only time will tell. Tom, Thanks for your comment on my "Greenthroat" I wouldn't mind seeing a whole clump of that one in a few years! Jean & Jan, Priscilla's Dream is one of my favorites, because of the 'geometric' patterned EZ. But she's not the best increaser, and not a real high bud count. Have to be patient with that one! Kathy, Judge Roy Bean was planted last year, and bloomed a short distance off the ground, with very small petals. I wasn't impressed until this year when it shot up to a height of about 40", and a bloom size of 9"! hosenemesis, Gee, maybe I should register that one (Greenthroat) in a few years! Thanks again, all, Julie

Robert, I am sorry your fall garden didn't work out. I made it easy on myself by not even attempting a fall garden, although I very much wanted to plant one. I can't stand to walk by the fall gardening seed display racks in the store. I stand and look at the seeds and think about the garden I could have growing right now if only rain would fall. We are still dry---at about 14" of rainfall for the entire year, and even the clay is turning to dust. Out in the pastures, if you touch the dried grasses, they crumble and turn to dust too. I'm beginning to think that without significant rainfall, we'll be living in a very dusty environment by winter. Today we had a pasture fire very close to us caused by someone baling very dry hay (an unwise choice, I think, given that the humidity was only 14%). It was paged out as a baler fire, but when we got there, neither the tractor nor the baler was on fire, but the whole hayfield was afire. It was roughly 100 yards from our back property line. Walking through unburned portions of the pasture, I noticed that the quality of the pasture grasses still standing was very poor---thin, sparse, lots of bare ground where usually there is very thick growth. I suppose they are baling it out of desperation....even poor quality hay is presumably better than no hay. We are at the point now that any spark sets something ablaze. I want to overseed the lawn around the house with rye grass, and now is the time to be doing it, but don't know if I can water it enough to make it germinate and grow. I'd love to have lovely green grass around the house all winter, since we didn't have much green to enjoy this summer. I did see some purple-flowered horsenettle blooming in the gravel parking lot at the fire station today. It looked really pretty. It is the only purple horse nettle I've seen blooming in months, and I assume it must be getting a bit of water whenever we refill the firetrucks there on that side of the building. You know it is a bad year when I'm excited to see a weedy plant in bloom! Larry, I have watered like mad and cannot even keep the bermuda grass green. That's pretty sad, isn' it. The trees and shrubs have been getting a deep soaking every couple of weeks with soaker hoses, so most of them are in pretty decent condition. Mia, Glad you have so much going on there! I have had ornamental kale last a surprisingly long time some years too. I think it is a much tougher plant than most of us think it is. And, y'all, today I had a new experience. I was outside around 8 a.m. putting out bird seed for the doves and cardinals and was chased back indoors by an insane skunk. We handled it the way you would handle any skunk out in broad daylight. I spent much of the rest of the day indoors just in case it has siblings or children that are hanging around. The bad thing about trying to have some green plants around during a drought is that they attract tons of wildlife, and not all of it is the kind of wildlife you want to see. Dawn

T2D - I wondered how a heptacodium woul look as a shrub.... That would definitely be too big for the space mine is in so I'm glad I pruned mine when it was small to make it a tree! Do you get the showy pink calyx phase? We never have; growing season too short I assume. If yours is in bloom now, that gives yours at least another week to develop that pink phase. Monarch butterflies have been few here the past several years too - I keep hoping for them to make a come-back.... The front garden is definitely the showy, 'public' face of the garden and visitors are usually quite surprised the first time they see the backyard :-) The front is pretty consistently showy from May to mid-Sept. It's a bit weak when it comes to fall color though and that's something I'm trying to improve. The main shot of fall color comes from the big white ash in the back yard, which towers above the house so provides fall color for the front too. If/when we lose the ash that will definitely negatively affect the appearance of both the front and back gardens. The yellow house is one of the reasons why there aren't too many yellow flowers in the garden! I figure I have enough yellow already..:-) Clear, softer yellows look not-too-bad with it but I don't like golds in combination with it, which eliminates most of the late summer yellow-y flowers.