Luckygal, Congratulations on all your planning, forethought, and hard work. It is really paying off! You gardens are beautiful, well planned and manicured. Looks wonderful. I love your flower photos. Going to try the Monkshood this year. I grew three Delphiniums last year and was amazed at how well they did here in Oklahoma, even with a horrid drought and triple digit temps. Everyone here told me they couldn't be grown. Just shows to go ya. I hope they come back, but even if they don't, they bloomed all season long and I enjoyed their beauty immensely. I love Yarrow. They grow wild here too. Most are white, but once in awhile I find some which are a pale pink or lilac colored. I also allow it to grow in places in my gardens. It is lovely and the white is so blousy and showy. However, I have difficulty growing the cultured type for some reason. I do have one clump left of the Coronation Gold that has lasted for more than ten years. Bought some of the Paprika last year, but it kicked the bucket in mid-June after blooming, then the hens dug it up. Darn! I would love to have a curved bed filled with large boulders and multi-colored Yarrow with some tall Coneflowers and/or Gloriosas here and there in the back. And some fine-leafed ornamental grasses, mayhaps. Ha! Ha! I bought several pots of Walker's Low Nepeta last year (on sale at a summer's end sale in July). I couldn't decide where to set them at that time and with all the family issues still brewing and the extreme heat, I didn't have time to garden that much, so they were just left in the little plastic pots and never got planted. They have sat there under the big Ash tree on the South side of the house and have pretty much been neglected, except for an occasional watering, and yet they are still green and looking pretty ding-dong good! That just blows my mind! Now I know where EXACTLY where I will plant them this Spring. If they are that hardy, I am sure they will do well in my garden! (If I can keep the chickens and cats out of them, that is). I really like your combination of the Dusty Miller with the Munstead. Looks terrific together and they would be very compatible. Awesome! I grow Munstead not only for the beautiful flowers and fragrance in the garden, but I also make tea from the leaves and use the Lavender blooms to make Lavender Sugar for cookies, cakes and teas. Pound Cake sprinkled with Lavender sugar before baking is absolutely scrump! Enjoyed all your pics and comments. Good luck with your Labyrinth. That sounds like a very big project! I wouldn't know where to start!!! ~Annie Thanks Hon!

Here's the Facebook link with some pictures: East Alabama Food Bank Ride The picture of the waterway that leads to the gulf is especially beautiful. Is that the Pearl River? We lived in New Orleans for many years, and all those places you mentioned are familiar. Where did you live in NOLA & which high school? When my husband told me we were moving, my very first thought was that my son wouldn't get to go to Ben Franklin H.S. I'm finally over it -- 14 years later ;) Thanks for including us on your adventure. These stories are great. I shed a tear though when you wrote about calling Robert & feeling homesick. He must miss you something fierce. Best regards & blessings to you all, Caroline.

Bonus... “Really, Tichy. Don’t be so demonic. Ours is simply a world in which more than twenty billion people live. Did you read today’s Herald? The government of Pakistan claims that in this year’s famine only 970,000 perished, while the opposition gives a figure of six million. In such a world where are you going to find Chablis, pheasants, tenderloin with sauce béarnaise? The last pheasant died a quarter of a century ago. That bird is a corpse, only excellently preserved, for we have become masters of its mummification—or rather: we have learned how to hide its death.” ― Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy “Dear patient (first name, last name)! You are presently located in our experimental state hospital. The measures taken to save your life were drastic, extremely drastic (circle one). Our finest surgeons, availing themselves of the very latest achievements of modern medicine, performed one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten operations (circle one) on you. They were forced, acting wholly in your interest to replace certain parts of your organism with parts obtained from other persons, in strict accordance with Federal Law (Rev. Stat. Comm. 1-989/0-001/89/1). The notice you are now reading was thoughtfully prepared in order to help you make the best possible adjustment to these new if somewhat unexpected circumstances in your life, which, we hasten to remind you, we have saved. Although it was found necessary to remove your arms, legs, spine, skill, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, other (circle one or more), rest assured that these mortal remains were disposed of in a manner fully in keeping with the dictates of your religion; they were, with the proper ritual, interred, embalmed, mummified, buried at sea, cremated with the ashes scattered in the wind—preserved in an urn—thrown in the garbage (circle one). The new form in which you will henceforth lead a happy and healthy existence may possibly occasion you some surprise, but we promise that in time you will become, as indeed all our dear patients do, quite accustomed to it We have supplemented your organism with the very best, the best, perfectly functional, adequate, the only available (circle one) organs at our disposal, and they are fully guaranteed to last a year, six months, three months, three weeks, six days (circle one).” ― Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy “So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment -- by simulation, that is mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann's Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F_1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, "Hurrah! Victory!!” ― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

THanks Kate! Thank you for offering me Magician's Magic. When I bought daylilies from Marriott's final sale before he closed his daylily business, he also gave me Magician's Magic as a bonus. Like yours, mine struggled to put out a nice bloom for the last 3 years. I think I have gotten only one or two times in the last 3 years that bloomed nicely. The rest of the times, they were either splotchy or not opened well. I had since moved it to the edge of my garden where I don't often frequent. I think it is still alive but if it passes on, I won't miss it. Here's what mine looked like this year.