Well, a little qualifier to that - 1) If you have a neighbor that's closer to the forest (deers' home), then talk them into planting some Knock Outs. They'll hit his yard before yours. ;-) 2) Be creative - Deer do not like unstable footing, neither do they like unusual lights. I placed a number of reflective balls in one of my gardens and laid some store-bought trellis pieces around the roses. The idea is that the reflections from the balls un-nerve them and the trellis wood on the ground gives them the heebie-geebies with their footing. Those things seem to have worked with me.

If you have scale you have ants. Ants farm the scale. They bring it to the plant and eat the secretions. Systemic poison like orthene helps. Work on getting rid of the ants.

It would help to see a picture of the entire plant or, at the least, a description of the entire plant. The 6th (I think) image -- darkish leaves -- may be a flowering crabapple. And consider posting in the Name that Plant Forum http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/namegal/ Here is a link that might be useful: images

Mommy2twocuties, we determined our main floor square footage by first deciding which rooms we had to have on that floor. As far as room sizes, one thing I did to visualize was to measure the sizes of rooms we had in our existing house and use that as a jumping off point. For example we had a dining room at the existing home that was 11x11. I knew from living in that space that it was much too tight for the table and china cabinet that we had and the buffet that I want someday. Based on that, I knew that 14x16 was the minimum size that I wanted. We also used the same formula for determining approximate sizes for the family room, bedrooms, walk in closets and kitchen. Because our existing rooms already had the furniture and stuff that would be moving with us, it made the numbers feel real to us and give some additional perspective. Once you know what you want/need for rooms on a floor, and the approximate size of each, you can better ball park the square footage that you are looking at. It will still bloat up with hallways, stairwells and closets, but you will know if you need to be looking at 1500, 2100, or 2800 square feet to accommodate your wants.