WOw! Your dad must have really been special! What a wonderful memory for you. That peachy flower is really lovely. I was going to say a balsam, but for its tallness. I love Balsams. Bought some seeds two weeks ago to start again this year, in fact. Maybe it is a throw back of some by-gone Balsam flower variety. We have lost many species of flowers since the 1800s, sad to say. Flowers that were tossed to the wayside as old-fashioned flowers - not showy or fancy enough for later flower snobs. Many had things bred out of them, like color variations and fragrances, in order to increase flower size or some other quality thought to be more important. Sad to know that they are long gone. Mankind thinks it knows better than God. When will will ever learn! ~ Annie

When I lived in Texas I had luck with growing bluebonnets from packaged seeds. Did you nick the seed first and soak it until it swells up? If not, that's usually the problem. Otherwise, if you have a friend with a patch of bluebonnets, a big shovelful of plants and surrounding dirt transplanted into your yard should give you a wonderful crop in a couple of years. Just don't try this on public land or private land without permission! Ginny

Jim, their gardening approach is the one with green mowed lawn all over no matter what. They know sh1t about real and serious gardening. They will write you up for having grass in your flowerbeds or having annuals not looking at their peak (because I was giving them time to reseed). I wish I could move to a house with no HOA. RC and Carrie, yep, everybody wants to impose their opinion on you. Omar

The crinum by the ditch is a good example that others may also enjoy it, and would be saddened to see that one day, it disappeared. Of course, we can't stop someone else from doing it, so it might very well be us who have lost the enjoyment of seeing it. In my case, I had a recent situation about this, too. A neighbor's brugmansia grows on the outside of his fence, accessible by the sidewalk. Last fall, I had thought to snip off a branch or two and try to root them for my own plants, but I thought how the owner might feel to see his branches snipped off, even if I thought I was careful in making it inconspicuous. Well, a few weeks ago, I noticed that he had cut it all the way down to the ground. So now I regret not asking or taking a few small cuts. Of course, just because he got rid of it doesn't mean I had any reason to take some for my own, but it's definitely one of those situations where you think how you could have taken a bit of the plant earlier and no "apparent" harm would have been done. But often times, we think there is no harm, except for the fact of sometimes not asking the owner first, who might very well notice and exclaim, "Hey, someone cut my plants!"