Temps are unseasonably warm in Sacramento, and it's dry. We only get 19 inches of rain a year, mostly Nov-Mar. We should have 11 inches so far, not the 6 inches we've logged. The roses are pushing new growth.So, we are pruning here with great urgency. We had a pruning party in the Sacramento cemetery rose garden on Saturday, and had about 15 people working hard. We are never exactly "done" there, if "done" means touching every single rose, but we've got most of the top priorities completed. We get together a handful of volunteers every Wed and Sat, and I stop in and prune a few roses whenever I drive by, so things are in fairly good shape. At home, things are more dire. I need to be doing ladder work to take care of my arches and espaliered roses. It's wonderful to have them bloom, but the work involved to keep overly vigorous roses in bounds is almost beyond me. I'm "only" 57 yrs old, but my hip's bursitis hurts badly enough to keep me awake at night, and getting up on a ladder is hard work, and hard on the joints. So is climbing underneath a rose. I've got the easy stuff done - but haven't quite completed Phyllis Bide, and have the monstrous Handel yet to conquer, and another arch and espaliered fence to deal with. I'm also still nibbling at the Teas and Chinas - don't really know how to deal with four-yr-old plants that are performing well but getting big for their spots. It's supposed to rain again Thurs and Fri, so I'd better get out there and get up on the ladder. My goal is to be done with my climbers in the next few days. Wish me luck. Wow - this is all a bit gloomy. The good news is that early daffodils are blooming, the birds are singing, the earliest fruit trees and daphne are starting to bloom, and it's wonderful to have a public and home garden to care for and enjoy. Life is good - and will be better when those !@#$%&* climbers are done! Anita

I understand a number have, which isn't surprising given the position they are planted in and the abundant over growth which has surrounded them for years, trapping moisture, shading them from light and competing underground with their massive root systems. Teas and Chinas can be quite prone to mildew in the wrong conditions, which that space became over time. Very little, if any, "collecting" occurred in the recent past and everything which grew there when we had our very active volunteer core was replicated and spread everywhere they were accepted. My "function" as a volunteer was propagation. I admit I was obsessive about making sure anything which didn't appear to be readily available in the Combined Rose List was propagated and given to any and every nursery and garden who would take it. I've lost rare things before being able to share them. The Huntington had lost rare things before being able to share them. Ralph Moore freely shared rare and interesting things after he learned the hard way, he lost the only plants of something important simply because he treated them as proprietary and didn't spread them around. After suffering that, he made sure anything he valued grew in as many places as they would be accepted. Several of us had the pleasure of restocking him with things he created, used then lost. Had I not shared the seedlings with Mel Hulse for The Heritage, Rayon Butterflies, Annie Laurie McDowell, Super Jane and a few others would be extinct. He was the good steward who preserved them until needed. Every rose in the Tea and China collection; every found and Bermuda Mystery Rose; every polyantha; every rose in the Study Plot; every older HT and floribunda; every odd species which grew at The Huntington was reproduced and sold at the Symposium and Friends sales; shared with Pixie Treasures (now gone), Ashdown (now gone), Sequoia (now gone), Vintage, and several others. Very many I grew in my old Newhall garden and shared freely with anyone seeking cuttings of them. I never want to hold the last unicorn horn as I am sure to lose it. That's too heavy an obligation to endure. I've spread every rose I ever imported as far and wide as they would be accepted to insure they remained here in case mine were lost. It worked with many and failed with several. I imported Louis Lens' Pink Mystery and spread it everywhere I could. It is extinct in this country. The same with R. Arkansana "Woodrow". Anything old, rare, unusual, desirable which grew anywhere on those grounds through the early nineties has been propagated and spread far and wide. Whether it has remained spread around or not, I can't guaranty, but every effort was deliberately made to get them "out there" to preserve them. After that time, there was a deliberate shift at the Library to replace volunteers with docents and the main efforts to collect and propagate ceased. Some purchases were made, but the whole focus changed from preservation and distribution through propagating our own plants for the sales to obtaining commercially available, five gallon, bud and bloom plants. The market changed from "collectors" of the unusual and rare to the "coffee table book crowd" who were willing and able to pay $35 for a pretty rose in a five gallon can, where "collectors" were thrilled with small plants in gallon cans for $6 to $6.50. That change was well under way when I stopped volunteering and working the plant sales. Initially, the commercial stock was donated. That changed as the industry suffered greater losses until I understand the stock was purchased for resale. Potting up commercial bare roots for sale is much less labor and time intensive than collecting cuttings from the gardens and other venues, striking them and nursing them along into retail worthy plants. It takes one-sixth the quantity to produce the same gross dollars at $35 each than $6. It takes significantly less labor to move a couple of hundred five gallon rose than it does a thousand gallons. With that said, no, I don't expect any earth shattering, exciting discoveries to be made from the rose audit there. It's very much the same with what happened with the Mildred Mathias Rare Plant Collection at UCLA. While Ms. Mathias lived and collected plants, they were the only source for their wonderful collection. Once she wasn't collecting and the university didn't support new collecting, often not even supporting propagating what they already had, what they originally had exclusives on became common from multiple growers. Just six years ago, the last I had access to that collection, I could buy two inch pots of "rare" salvias from them for $13 COST each, or four inch pots of the SAME salvia from nearly a dozen other sources for $3 cost, each. To remain a 'rare plant source', you have to continue adding rare plants. Once you stop, what was rare quickly becomes common. Kim

They're beautiful. I agree, hoyas come in the most fantastic color combinations! So do succulents. (I see that's your favorite forum.) I never knew until I came to GardenWeb what an amazing range of color plants came in. I've learned so much. I am an artist too, but I haven't been, er, arting very much lately. But I think I'm getting inspired to get back into it. :)

My brother and his family, from St. Louis was passing through our area this weekend on his way to Colonial Williamsburg, so my other brother and his family came down from Northern Virginia for a mini-reunion. We played a game where each person writes down 5 answers for people to guess on slips of paper, and puts them in a bowl. The answers can be the names of famous people, or a movie title, or a character, or almost anything. Some can be quite easy, others could be rather obscure and difficult. The players are split into two teams, which sit alternately around in a circle with the role of clue-giver rotating around the circle. The first round is similar to catch phrase or taboo where the clue-giver says almost any clue as long as he or she doesn't say any of the words on the slip of paper. For instance you might say "A tall monument in Paris" or "A movie. His name (pointing at Joe) against a mountain that spews lava" or "He's the First President". The clue-giver gets one minute to have their team guess as many answers as possible, which are tallied, and set aside. The the next play from the other team gets a turn. Once the bowl of answers is empty, the second round starts, where all of the clues are returned to the bowl, and the game proceeds as before, but the clue-giver cannot speak, and instead must perform the answers charades-style. Again getting one minute to have their team guess as many as possible. When the bowl is empty again, the answers are once again returned to the bowl, for the third round, where the clue-giver is only allowed to say a single, carefully chosen word to get their team to guess each answer. At first it might seem exceedingly difficult, but since everyone has seen all of the answers in the first two rounds, it can actually go surprising fast, with a team getting 10 answers in a single turn. A couple of the answers or clues given were quite funny. One of my favorites was when the clue-giver said "I'm not sure who this is, I think she's one of a pair of tennis playing sisters" and someone on that team guessed "Vanessa Williams?" Which was the right answer. After that person's turn everyone laughingly pointed out that the sisters are Serena and Venus Williams, whereas Vanessa Williams, was an actress and singer and a former Miss America. Later though I got that answer during the second charades round, and couldn't think of how to act out "actress" or "Miss America" so I simply did a quick forehand, and a backhand, and some one quickly guessed "Vanessa Williams". In the third round, the obvious one-word clue for that answer was of course "Tennis" Another funny answer was when someone misspelled "Pinocchio" as "Pinnocuccino" which we subsequently decided would be a good name for a fancy cappuccino-type drink, perhaps with Amaretto di Saronno and you make it with half-and-half but tell people it contains skim milk.