Flower is fleeting! There are some great workhorse plants, but for the most part, blooms are a nice spice that come--then go. You can design different parts of a garden to have a peak season--a month to 6 weeks where they are glorious, then fade into the background. Or you can put a bunch of workhorses in a garden and get pretty constant solid bloom from late March until September or later--but then you're relying on some spring ephemerals plus some very, very familiar perennials and annuals. For someone who clearly wants a BLOOMING border, this is often the best solution. Or you can mix in a foundation of workhorses and a number of more seasonal plants, so that you don't a riot of bloom, necessarily, but there's always something going on. This is what I tend to do. In my personal gardens, flowers are the flourish, or the spice--not even the icing, really, because they just aren't that dominant. (Most of my house is in shade, so I don't really have a choice...) For the most part, I concentrate on the FOLIAGE. Sometimes, I don't even care what color things bloom, especially in my shade gardens, because the blooms will so often be so far apart and inconspicuous compared to the foliage! I like to concentrate on 1) COLOR of foliage, not bloom. The color of foliage plays an enormous role in the rhythm of a bed. I've found that most beds can support 3 major colors. The most common colors are green (obviously)--from almost black to a light true green, chartreuse, purple (only works in shade directly against another color), silver/white, peach/red/orange, and blue. One color will be green--the other two depend on the situation! I started with a Japanese painted fern under my tree bed that I'm starting this year. Purple heurchera looks GREAT, and so do the pale-edged hostas (which are more white than gold). But the true chartreuse citronelle heuchera that I tried looks HORRIFIC, and it's going to have to make room for a more silvery heurchera to set off the purple one (purple with nothing around it disappears in shade and just looks drab). 2) The FORM of the plants--are they spiky? Mounding? Flat-topped groundcovers? Climbing? You can get a LOT of mileage out of conscious repetition and contrast, both. 4) The TEXTURE of the leaves--not the whole plant, but the individual leaves. Big, fat round leaves can be echoed in big, fat strappy leaves and contrasted against ferny leaves, etc. If you pay attention to everything BUT the flowers, you can actually get some pretty awesome results. If you pay attention to just the flowers, the result usually disappoint. My front bed I started right after I moved here. I wasn't familiar with growing ANYTHING in this region (seriously, it was the first time I ever saw blooming azaleas and hydrangeas), so I took the "buy what's on clearance, throw it in the ground, see what the deer don't eat to the ground, and learn about the plants" approach. :-) For my main curb garden, which is only 35' wide (pie-shaped lot), I wanted an informal mixed shrub border to screen the house from all the cars--and headlights--that turn around in the cul-de-sac. I was completely unfamiliar with MOST of the shrubs here at that time, so I just bought stuff that looked nice and was under $5 and looked like it'd get the right size. My rules were about form and color. I got 1/2 green (with some with chartreuse accents), 1/4 chartreuse, and 1/4 purple. I put tiny leaves next to big leaves, blobs next to spikes, and I'm still in the process of figuring out what other workhorse perennials I can fill the bare spaces with (in amongst the shrubs). Sand cherries by themselves are boring and tend to get leggy--as an accent in front of a wall of green behind a chartreuse-tinged arb, they really look great. People keep asking me what they are, and no one believes me that they're the same plants as you see all the time next to the highway. Between the *yawn* spireas, the cliched knockout rose, and the altheas, I actually do have *something in bloom all the time, pretty much by accident, but it's the colors and shapes of the foliage that are arresting. I let it go for a few years, to see how it would fill out, and now I REALLY need to do some refining at various points, but I've had tons of people in the neighborhood tell me how much they love the garden and how happy it makes them to see it at the end of the street. I've had people ask me to design things for them, and a few people have said that I should be designing professionally. (Um, NO. Not up to that! I STILL don't have a good grasp on what really does and doesn't do well here--I've tried 5 different plants in one spot on the back, and they all die or get eaten within the year--and I can't quite think as clearly in all four dimensions as I'd want to be able to before setting out a shingle. And I'm terrified of pruning most bushes wrong. But it's flattering, nevertheless.)

Melons and cucumbers are the same thing. We just typically call the sweet round ones "melons" and the less sweet long green ones "cucumbers." In other words, melons are cucumbers and cucumbers are melons. There are several round and oval "cucumbers" and it looks like a seed from one was mixed in with your "regular" cucumbers. I am growing the same round cucumbers (on purpose) from small plants I got at the nursery. It looks like this might be a Carosello of some type. "fasano" I think. Makes wonderful sweet pickle or relish or is great in cold salad with mint/stevia/yogurt dressing.

Lainey, I had a similar experience with a nursery in our town. Sum and Substance was riddled with serious signs of HVX. I spoke to the clerk who had no idea what HVX was and she called their hortculturalist over to speak with me. When I spoke with him he told me he had been somewhat concerned that they had HVX but wasn't sure. He didn't know that test kits were available or how to get them. I gave him the info he needed and told him he should pull them from stock. I asked which nursery they came from and he told me Willoway. I was happy to see him grab a cart and start removing all their hosta from the sale yard. I was pretty surprised and disappointed that this horticulturalist didn't do any research on HVX once he suspected the hosta were infected but pleased that he was willing to listen and take action.

Katherine, isn't it cool how something so simple can brighten up your day? I'm glad the box arrived and did just that for you! So, how is our little robin doing? Does it have far to go before arriving back here in Michigan? Robins are a sign of Spring, and it would indeed be great to see one right about now! Let's take a look and see where our robin has been, and has yet to go, shall we? So, here's our current list... dan/dan_the_mailman..... SENT/ melissa/hazelnutbunny .....SENT/RECEIVED deb/debbya...................SENT/RECEIVED cindy/quiltpartner ...........SENT/RECEIVED linda/linda ruzicka ...........SENT/RECEIVED melinda/ilovefarac michelle/micyrey ...........SENT/RECEIVED katherine/justamomofsix .........../RECEIVED Where will our robin land next? Hmmm, it looks to me like it's going to go to Melinda next! Yayyyyy for Melinda! Kath, how's the box holding up? -Dan