GrandmaBarb, Just loved the pretty little birdhouse and the fantastic garden pointer. How clever you are!! Barb sent me a sign that she had made from an old piece of weathered board on which she had painted the prettiest yellow flowers on the left of the board. On the right of the board she had glued little tiny pointed pinecones in the shape of an arrow with blue jewels along the sides showing the way to the garden. On both the birdhouse and garden sign she had painted Ellens Joy. I am so happy that you were my Secret Santa as you nailed my personality to a tee. Thanks for the time you spent on my gift during this busy time of year. I love it. Ellen

Since Ian Barclay occasionally reads/posts to this forum and runs a nursery in WA that specializes in water-wise gardening in the PNW, I think that his perspective is important. He sells Ribes speciosum (http://desertnorthwest.com/catalog/plants_western.html), and here is his take: "Hardy to about 10 F" "It is one of the few drought-deciduous shrubs we can grow in the Northwest." "Although native to central California, IT DOES FINE IN MILDER NORTHWEST GARDENS, occasional leaf drop notwithstanding." (my emphasis) If you have a problem with me SUGGESTING Ribes speciosum for a relatively mild climate like Portland, I can't image what you think of Ian for SELLING the plant to PNW customers. Be sure to express your displeasure the next time that he posts here.

Unless you go to the effort of actually "killing" the trees you cut down, then yes INDEEDY they will grow back and it's not pretty...spindly, bent, leaning toward whatever sun they can find and very poor quality trees will result. After you cut the trees down, kill them systemically within hours of cutting them. Your MNR or Conservation Authority or even an arborist can tell you what product will work the best for the species you are cutting down. I live inside a maple woods farm woodlot (city subdivision) with a smattering of Black Cherry, American Beech, Alternate leaf dogwood etc. I'm about 1 hour to the west of you. Our woods is not great... 3rd growth sugarmaple forest so like yours, it is VERY tall (all maples are about 70' tall) and the canopy is very high and sparse. We have a contract in our subdivision that we can't touch the trees unless they become sick or die and even then we have to petition to the city to allow us to get a tree expert to come in and take the tree out. At any rate, being a 3rd growth forest we see a poorly developed layering of the woods. High canopy with nothing underneath. So I've been working on finding species that will thrive in the understory to hopefully build it up at different levels. It takes a lot of experimenting to see what works best but so far I've added 45 new species that are all thriving and only 2 or 3 things have not done well. My local MNR told me that restoring the understory is next to impossible but I wasn't willing to accept that and give up and so far things are going well. On the ground we've managed to keep masses of Blue Cohosh, Trout Lily, Red Trillium, White Trillium etc...these were all here when we moved in but are at risk because all the other neighbors in the subdivision have gone against the city contract and removed them all. If you are interested, here is what we have successfully added to the wooded aread of the backyard in 2 years: Existing Native Trees, Shrubs and Plants Sugar Maple Black Cherry American Beech Pin Cherry Alternate Leaf Dogwood Highbush Cranberry Blue Cohosh (+s) White Trillium Red Trillium Jack-in-the-Pulpit Removed Alien Invasives Garlic Mustard Oriental Bittersweet (poison ivy also removed due to children and pets) Native species added Red Oak (1) Downy Serviceberry (3) Pumpkin Ash sapling (1) Eastern Redbud (2) Eastern Redbud seedlings (2) Arrowwood Viburnum (3) Red Osier Dogwood (1) Red Osier Dogwood seedlings (6) American Hazelnut (1) Nannyberry (1) Spicebush (9) Winterberry Bush (3) Silky Dogwood Bush (1) Silky Dogwood seedlings (6) Blue Beech Sapling (1) BurOak (1) Bur Oak Sapling (1) Winged Sumac seedlings (3) Spotted Jewelweed White violet (2) Purple violet (5) Yellow violet (2) Pale Corydalis (3) Bloodroot (+ Âs) Mayapple (+Âs) Wild Ginger (3) Bunchberry (3) - OctÂ04 did not survive winter Bunchberry seeds - octÂ05 Blue Eyed Grass (3) SolomonÂs Seal (6) False SolomonÂs Seal (+Âs) Canadian Columbine (2) Baptisia Australis (1) White Baneberry "DollÂs Eyes" (2) White Baneberry "DollÂs Eyes" Seeds - octÂ05 Red Baneberry seeds - octÂ05 Lady Fern (3) Christmas Fern (3) Cinnamon Fern (3) Male Fern (1) Ostrich Fern (+Âs) Wood Fern (1) HartÂs Tongue Fern (2) Maidenhair Fern (2) Royal Fern (3) Sensitive Fern (+Âs) Crested Shield Fern (1) Garlic Mustard and Oriental Bittersweet are 2 species that will take over an understory if they are allowed to take hold. If you are serious about working on your understory I would survey it first and make sure you don't have an invasion of any of the alien invasivies and get rid of those first if you do. Opening up the canopy will just throw those things into hyper-growth. Doing ground planting with native plants and shrubs will help prevent the areas from being taken over by the non-native, invasives. I also agree with the poster who said removing clumps of sugar maples would be more beneficial than overall thinning. You will get the same benefit but in grander doses and it will be much easier to introduce new species in clearings than to try to get something to grow in an un-natural way (like I am). The MNR told me "that it's next to impossible because even the understory shrubs and trees need to be able to compete to a certain extent with the large/tall trees. To try to get them to do it after the fact is almost impossible." So if you clear small areas throughout your woods you will have clearings where you can add trees like Tulip Tree, Red or Bur Oak etc... along with shrubs and plants and the will be able to thrive with the prescribed amount of sun/shade mixture. Sun from above but shade when the sun is at an angle on the rest of the woods. Call your local Conservation Authority office and ask about their re-forestation offers. My Conservation Authority and the London office work together to offer GREAT deals on native trees and shrubs to anyone with large tracts of land who wish to naturalize, reforest or create windbreaks. The trees are extremely inexpensive and well worth the effort to pick them up. I don't know what your office is but here's the page for my office so you can see the kinds of deals they have: Thames River Conservation Authority This page is the hardwoods section but you can also get fir trees and shrubs. For really cheap seedlings you will want to look for native tree/shrub/plant services in your area or come down to LongPoint (actually Walsingham) to a place called "Acorus Restoration". Bare root seedlings are 2.00 each and they have almost all native species respective to southern Ontario. They do large government and private restoration projects but are also open to the public. I have purchased a grand majority of my plants, shrubs and trees from this place because even if they die, I'm only out a few bucks. Here is their website: Acorus Restoration Acorus Restoration is used to dealing in large volumes so even if you ordered a huge amount they should be able to accomodate you. Email replies by these folks are kinda unreliable sometimes and the whole place is very *WIERD* (I can tell you off-list about it if you like to email me about it). But the plants are good quality and seem to thrive just fine. Good luck with your project and keep us updated on how it's going. Barb southern Ontario, CANADA zone 6a

Let me preface this by saying the picture quality below is really, really bad. Unfortunately, they're all I've got with me! I should also say that I know I'm slightly late to the party. We started dismantling yesterday and I couldn't bear the thought of taking everything down w/o getting some pics first. We actually had two trees, one real and one artificial. The real tree was so dried out by yesterday it was...well, let's just say it wasn't ready for it's close up. Anyway... Here's the street-facing artificial tree (as you can see we can't fit a star/angel/ribbon on top). At first I was upset about that, but the starlessness has kind of grown on me. And here's a gratuitous shot of my favorite flowers in the world - tulips. I was absolutely delighted to see them back in the grocery store right before we hosted our family Christmas Party on the day after Christmas. So, I splurged and paid supermarket prices for them - and they were worth it! This is the flower arrangement a very sweet friend of the family brought me. I love it. I've been in denial about getting rid of it because it's so damn pretty. And a close up of our mantel. Pretty self explanatory. Thanks for indulging me :)