Oh, well. At least you know how to kill them. :) Callas do well. I have them on a western exposure about a foot from the house in almost full sun and tucked in behind some liriope and in front of Indian Hawthorne. (Before I had them in a more exposed area and they froze back to the ground and only got six inches tall). They are twelve to eighteen inches high and stay evergreen except for as few months in the summer. (They are evergreen from September through June and bloom in April.) Cannas do well also, but there are the dreaded canna leaf roller caterpillars than I keep fighting. Hostas do much better in pots than in the ground because they get colder in the winter and the drainage is better. I have Patriot hostas and some of their offspring.) You might want to check out the daylily festival in Abbeville. It should be coming up soon. You can grow evergreen daylily varieties. As far as the amaryllis, I have several. You can pick them up at Wal-Mart and Lowes around Christmas for a few dollars a piece. They are evergreen and bloom right now. Also, there are a lot of cool gingers you can grow. Check out gingerwood nursery online. It is located right outside Baton Rouge. Tim Chapman is the owner and he is on the ginger forum and is real good about answering questions. The white butterfly ginger (Hedychium) is really nice and spreads rapidly and is junglesque. I also like crinum and eucomis. They do well. A rapidly spreading plant is mexican petuia (ruellia). I have purple and pink ones that get three feet high and are covered with flowers all summer. I could send you some seeds later in the summer if you remind me. The evergreen dwarf agapanthus are really nice too. Home Depot has them right now. As far as reading, you might want to check out Louisiana Gardener (it is the only magazine I get) and Southern Livings Garden Guide (an encyclopedia of 5,000 plants) and Louisiana Gardener's Guide by Dall Gill and Garden Perennial for the Coastal South by Barbara Sullivan (Beautiful pictures and some different plants)

I only see one chair. From the general style, it's one of the elaborate "Revival" chairs of the 1920s and 30s ... Jacobean Revival, Tudor Revival, Renaissance revival. Most of them were elaborately decorated mass-market pieces that used the decorative bits from the period they were reviving without much thought as to whether they fit or not. Your chair, for example, has the Rococo era C-shaped scrolling from one style and the twisted "barley sugar" spindles from another era and country. If they are sturdy, they are worth cleaning and reupholstering.

The fire or coals would be built in the removable pan, not the base if it were a brazier, Linda. Yes, flower pots do come in copper and brass even if it is toxic to plants. Ask me how I know, I've run a floral business for quarter of a century. And if it were a cachepot there is no reason for drainage. It's just a decorative place to stick the real pot. Yes, it does look like one of those made in India for export items. They're often meant to be more decorative than functional. We've had this baptismal font discussion on the antique forum before. Most private estates don't have spare fonts tucked away for a rainy day ;-) Most fonts have some sort of religious symbolism on them as well. This is about as secular as it comes. Staci.............we're all just guessing at this point because it's pretty a pretty bizarre (uhm novel) piece. I have seen a couple similar ones online identified as baptismal fonts, but one dealer was honest enough to admit it was for want of a better description and asked if anyone could really identify what it was, to please let them know. It's some sort of artistic piece and may be little more than a stand meant to be used to display something else on....that's why I asked for dimensions.

Thank you, aurorawa! That sounds like very likely! I've been looking at photos of Clusia all morning. So...not to confuse things, before I checked back onto this forum, I went to another nursery early this morning (Mickey Hargitay) and showed the photo to the manager there. His guess was that it was a ficus, which surprised me. When Googling, I came across Ficus Microcarpa Roundleaf. It's also another possibility, as it resembles this tree. It is apparently a slow growing tree, too. What do you guys think? It could be either one. Although I am leaning towards Clusia, as that guy did say the tree came from Hawaii. Although Clusias are apparently fast growing trees, so it would make no sense for one to be priced at $250 for such a small tree.