I have had Sweet Beauty for 2 years (grown from bare root). The fragrance is wonderful! I've had it's sport parent Buxom Beauty...and it stayed small for a few years, but now is vigorous with lots of blooms. I expect the same from Sweet Beauty. Here's a pic of Buxom Beauty: Tells a bit of the truth that I don't have one of Sweet Beauty. Although I was not feeling well for most of August. The blooms are large and shaped like above. Carol

Embo, I had thought about that. But it grew this way even when it was in a big 5 gallon pot for a couple years before planting outside. I really doubt that was infested with a high titer of root rot organisms; as I've pointed out before, even rather sensitive plants like Rhododendron rex will survive in a pot around here (and grow) it's when they are planted out that problems begin. And a lot of the pictures you can find on the internet show the plants looking like this. (the ones Karen posted were exceptions!) Contrast, with, for example, Don Wallace's Rhododendron hybrid 'Cloudburst'. Certainly not bred for east coast conditions. Came rooted cutting size 3.5 years ago, was put in a slightly smaller pot (maybe 3 gallon) and sized up impressively. I happen to know I always placed them right next to each other in my jungle of pots...because they were the big ones that were placed towards the back. If there was some extremely virulent pathogen around, it should have affected that as well...or any of the 20 other rhododendrons in the vicinity. (Sadly 'Cloudburst' died in the big Jan 2018 freeze here) Finally, there's no dying back, it's just a refusal to make significant growth. Any other plants I've had with root rot here, will at least grow vigorously during spring, until they keel over in the summer. Something like 'Biskra' put out shoots when it was mild in April, but dies within a couple weeks of it getting hot. This obviously hasn't done that. Maybe it's a side effect of micro-propagation that will wear off eventually? OTOH, we know at least one of the parents is extremely prone to root rot...so it is something I'm going to be concerned about, long term, with this plant.

Thank you, Earle and Aegis. Appreciate that you both found something there that you really liked. Irina - thank you! I was hoping someone would offer me a description/corrected name (I was pretty sure I didn't have it right.) I will amend my labeling immediately. I love what the plant is named after, too - I can just picture those pretty winter birds after your explanation. :-) Alabama, thanks for relaying your own experience with growing in that exposure and with LED's. I would imagine I will have to adjust the length of time the lights are on based on the time of year. When the sun is at it's high point in the year, the window gets much more bright light at morning and evening than it does right now. It could be tricky to make AV's happy long term, esp. those not first along the window side of the shelf. So far I am not using a timer, but manually turning the lights on and off, while keeping watch. Some are still leaning towards the window in spite of the lights, but not all. Most are growing nice and flat, so I think you're right that some plants will be happy there but there may be some I'll have to move to the fluorescent lighted stand eventually. It's an interesting experiment, anyway.

Exactly - and I'm certainly in no rush to convert all my florescent fixtures over to LED. It would save money in the long run, but I can see from my experiment that it would not make all of my plants happy. (Maybe not even most.) Yes, there are those funky blue/red=violet LED's, but I've seen them displayed in the local big box and I couldn't bear their color in my house (shudder.) Actually, I was just hoping to have a nice isolation area. For now, those plants that are happy under these lights (Sweet Tea is a good example - nice flat rosette, beautiful big blooms held high) ARE happy. So perhaps this shelf will eventually be thinned down to the handful of plants that really seem to do well there and the rest will go back to the plant room to live under good old T-8's. However, I still haven't gone through a summer season when the light coming from east and west brightens this window noticeably. Still testing.... Anne