4' would be fine...and the beauty is that 'Blue Chip' is an excellent low-growing sprawler...I have about 4 of them tucked in spaces around roses where I need a splash of blue/purple. They bloom all summer/fall and I found they are very winter hardy. Just a haircut in the Spring and they start blooming. Just a hint, though...they are lazy and might take awhile to bud out...so don't be too hasty to yank them if you think they've died. I had one that I thought didn't make it through the Winter but I over-pruned it in the Spring and it took it awhile to bounce back. It was late June/July before it woke up and then it went bonkers and started growing like its siblings to make up for lost time. An added bonus is the beautiful butterflies that will haunt your garden...

Tonight I was with my grandaughter tracking Santa on Norad and after we were done I clicked in to Wavelit live cam and there he was, a male lion. We watched for about 1/2 hour and saw a female lion and another male. This has been really interesting so far as I have seen a mother and baby giraffe, a wart hog, wildebeaste, elands, gazelles, monkeys, turtles and a stork like bird feeding in the waterhole. I have got two of my daughters watching too so it is really catching on. Cheers Al

Liezelgil – I know what you mean about Ludwigs – my husband doesn’t have the patience:) so I always go with my mom. The occasional snowstorm is ok I guess but I would swap with your weather any day. Winters here can be really trying – this is my 17th away from SA – we haven’t seen the sun in over a week! Not too worry, it will be over soon and anyway my rose seeds are starting to sprout. Three germinated yesterday so in a week or two I’ll start transplanting them. That will keep my busy until spring starts good and proper.

I found this article about roses and drought: http://paulzimmermanroses.com/care/summer-care/should-you-water-your-roses-during-a-drought/ The roses in my personal garden haven’t been watered in over a decade. And that includes during a drought. but then I read this in our rose breeder's newsletter: http://www.ludwigsroses.co.za/newsletter/ The way trees drink Scientists who study forests say they’ve discovered something disturbing about the way prolonged drought affects trees. It has to do with the way trees drink. They don’t do it the way we do — they suck water up from the ground all the way to their leaves, through a bundle of channels in a part of the trunk called the xylem. The bundles are like blood vessels. When drought dries out the soil, a tree has to suck harder. And that can actually be dangerous, because sucking harder increases the risk of drawing air bubbles into the tree’s plumbing. Plant scientist Brendan Choat explains: “As drought stress increases, you have more and more gas accumulating in the plumbing system, until they can’t get any water up into the leaves. This is really bad news for the plant because this is like having an embolism in a human blood vessel.” Like a human embolism, the gas bubbles stop the flow of fluid. If that persists, it means thirst, starvation and eventually death. Choat is from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, a region that has seen years of record-breaking drought. He wondered: How much drought does it take before trees start choking on air bubbles? He and a team of researchers studied 226 species of trees around the world, including desert trees, rain forest trees and many others. They discovered that for most, it doesn’t take much drought at all. “So this is the key thing,” Choat says, “that it would only take a small shift in terms of the moisture environment, the temperature … to push these plants across the threshold.” The threshold between drinking and choking, that is. The reason there’s so little margin of error is that trees have to finely balance eating and drinking. To eat, they open holes in their leaves, called stomata, to absorb carbon dioxide. But the more they do that, the more they lose water by transpiration through the stomata. Lose too much, and they have to start sucking harder — and risk a deadly embolism. Choat’s research, in the journal Nature, shows that it doesn’t take much drought before trees start to self-destruct. But what about trees that have evolved to live in really hot, dry places? They’re sippers, not gulpers. Plant scientists like Bettina Engelbrecht figured they’d have a larger margin of safety before they choke. “Instead,” she says of Choat’s research, “we find, well, it’s all the same — everyone is right at the edge and has a very risky strategy.” Engelbrecht, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, studies rain forest trees. “Now, we have to worry about all of them,” she says. “We have to really deal with the problem at the global scale.” That’s because temperatures are rising around the globe. That makes drought more likely and more intense. Big droughts have hit southern Europe, Russia, Australia and the U.S. in recent years. The first 10 months of 2012 were the warmest ever in the continental U.S. Along with the heat came widespread drought, which still persists in the Southwest. Nathan McDowell, a plant scientist at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, actually puts trees under plastic to see how they deal with less water and more heat. He says trees are adaptable, up to a point. “Now we’re changing that climate range really fast,” he notes, “faster than any of the living plants here have experienced. So can they change fast enough to adapt to that? You know, the preponderance of evidence right now is saying that [at] lots of locations around the world, they’re not adapting fast enough.” When they don’t adapt, they stop growing. Beetles and other insects invade. If droughts last long enough, the forests just die, and get replaced with something else. Please help me to understand this Straw.... What I've noticed in the past with severe droughts myself is that once a plant has reached it's threshold no amount of water can make it grow and live again...and if it does, it is usually riddled with all kinds of fungal (and other) diseases and bad insects. How can not watering your roses during a drought be a good thing, as stated in the site on the top?