I can't really relax until the end of October because that month is when we usually have wildfires, although this year we seem to have had them somewhere or other since May, with the horrific Yosemite fire still burning as we speak. October can be cooler or it can still be hot, so my daily hand watering may or may not turn into watering every second day. What I crave most is rain, so that I won't have to water at all for a week or two, and the danger of fires will be over. That's also the time when the roses will recover from the summer doldrums. I don't think I've ever seen so many rose bushes where the majority of leaves range from somewhat dry and unsightly to totally desiccated and truly ugly. I'm more than ready for all that to go away, and look forward to a moist and green fall and winter, should I be so lucky. Ingrid

"Nature" didn't have a thing to do with the coats of almost any dog. It's all selective breeding for which human beings are responsible.. Desert people wear long clothes to protect them from the sun, but they wear loosely woven fibers like cotton, not heavy wool. Northern wolves have heavy double or triple coats, & our coyotes (if we have wolves here, I haven't seen them!) have double coats, but the top coat is very thin. When I had long-haired dogs with double & triple coats, I always did a modified shave every summer. Shaving them to the skin is very dangerous, but getting that hot mass off them is so much kinder than leaving them to wear their winter coat in a Texas summer.

T2D - I wondered how a heptacodium woul look as a shrub.... That would definitely be too big for the space mine is in so I'm glad I pruned mine when it was small to make it a tree! Do you get the showy pink calyx phase? We never have; growing season too short I assume. If yours is in bloom now, that gives yours at least another week to develop that pink phase. Monarch butterflies have been few here the past several years too - I keep hoping for them to make a come-back.... The front garden is definitely the showy, 'public' face of the garden and visitors are usually quite surprised the first time they see the backyard :-) The front is pretty consistently showy from May to mid-Sept. It's a bit weak when it comes to fall color though and that's something I'm trying to improve. The main shot of fall color comes from the big white ash in the back yard, which towers above the house so provides fall color for the front too. If/when we lose the ash that will definitely negatively affect the appearance of both the front and back gardens. The yellow house is one of the reasons why there aren't too many yellow flowers in the garden! I figure I have enough yellow already..:-) Clear, softer yellows look not-too-bad with it but I don't like golds in combination with it, which eliminates most of the late summer yellow-y flowers.

That is some kind of "big leaf" rhododendron. I don't have one. I have no doubt a grafted one would grow well for me...at least the hardiest big leaves like R. rex. So this is perhaps a good time to express my increasing infuriation with the paucity of what we should perhaps call "performance grafting" in the US. (Vs. something like Japanese Maples, which much be grafted, so is really propagative grafting) . Probably the biggest rhodo nursery in the world, Baumeschule Hachmann in Germany, ONLY produces grafted plants. Namely for performance reasons, too, although the concern there is limey soil, not hot, wet soil. Though they surely also have a awareness that certain cultivars will do better grafted, even in chilly north Europe. The Scottish Coxes, gardening in the most maritime of climates, nevertheless complain that certain cultivars perform better if grafted, in their vast encyclopedia of hybrids. As far north as MA, a R. rex in a collector's garden died one hot summer ,not one winter. The root rot is even a problem up there! So absolutely, grafting onto a rot resistant rootstock would allow R. rex to survive here. Even on the benign North Island of NZ, it's been done to permit certain big leaf species to grow without threat of root rot collapse. But here? I'm not going to name names, but feel like I've exhausted my options for convincing a commercial source to do it. Am I too cynical to wonder if they just like knowing a certain % of what they ship outwith the PNW is likely to eventually die of root rot? And thus need to be replaced? Perhaps. Or maybe it's just "this is the way we're always done things, and we don't like upstarts with new-fangled ideas". At any rate it leaves the only option being trying to breed tougher big leafs. Tim who sometimes posts here, is raising some promising hybrids, including one involving the native Rhododendron maximum. (Which still isn't tough enough to be seen much south of DC, in the Piedmont and plains at least.)