We usually have a good selection of striped roses, including those three, in our rose society rare rose auction, which is held in November every year. If you don't find them before then, please stop by our website www.ccrsauction.com in, say, August, which is when we usually figure out what we can sell for that year. Right now the information on the website mostly concerns last year's auction. I also collect suggestions from whereever as to what people are looking for during the year, and I grow two of those three roses you mentioned (Camille and Alfred), so I'll try to get those started to give to the auction this time. Your timing in asking is just about perfect. Thank you Kathy

I assume you'll be keeping pretty close to St Pete during your visit. If you intend to venture further afield, I'd recommend a visit to the remarkable rose gardens at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. In addition to the vast array of roses that Malcolm Manners has collected and oversees there, the college is famous for the buildings Frank Lloyd Wright designed for its campus (the world's largest collection of FLW-designed buildings situated in one location). Lakeland is roughly the same distance from St Pete as Sarasota (but in another direction). Donny, are you still selling roses at the Farmers Market in Raleigh? If so, when would be a likely time to find you there come spring/early summer?

Hi Sapphires- Dingbats are almost always just tiny pictures/symbols and not letters. There is such a wide variety out there! I have butterflies, flowers, postage stamps, ethnic designs, holiday images, animals, and all other kinds of patterns & images. There is a different picture assigned to each letter of the alphabet. It is a way to add cute little images to your projects that will always be nice & clear no matter how large you make them. Let's say you are making a card and want a border of flowers along the bottom. You can make that border by typing a row of flower dingbats. Or maybe on the inside you have a birthdy greeting and you want a little picture of a hat or cake beside the words. You can type the birthday dingbat and make it any color you want. I can type a dingbat in my image editor and fill it with a a pattern or photo and turn it into my own custom clip art. I collect dingbats for various crafts, like card making, stickers, creating background papers, shrinky plastic charms, image transfer on polymer clay, & the marble magnets & pushpins. I even glued a bunch to the links on a blank bracelet and made my own custom jewelry! Karen

You are right Squirrel and thank you so much for the help but I think they elected to stay with the original green. We don't live there on a full time basis so I haven't really heard for sure but it is pretty hard to change the minds of "old" people. I fit in that catagory but I still think that green is ugly since the brick does not have even a hint of green in it. Think the builder got a good deal on the paint in 1975 and residents just won't let go of it!