Thanks for the nice comments! The garden is my main hobby - and my passion :-) One of the reasons we bought this property was the existing ash, white pines, and young red oak that made a perfect setting for a garden. The rest was pretty much a blank slate, so it's come a long way in the past 14 years - and there's still more that needs doing... - thank goodness! (I'd be terribly bored if there were no changes required!) pm2- the clematis on the end of the garage is supposed to be Nike (I have a lot of clematises that appear to be not what the label said it was supposed to be!) The color is a bit odd this year - it's usually has a redder undertone - this is what it looked like last year: Perhaps the cooler temperatures this year affected the color....? As for the size and bushiness - I never bother cutting my group 3 clematies back hard. I just trim off any obviously winter-killed bits and trim them as necessary to neaten them up a bit. That seems to work for me to get vigorous bloom from them top to bottom! They get a small dose of clematis fertilizer in late May or early June. I suspect it'll be another two years at least before the clematises on the fence side of the swag will make it up to the chains. I had to replace a few that didn't make it through their first year in the ground (planted in late summer 2010). Thanks for the 'Golden Shadows' suggestion. That looks like a possibility. I actually have a Wolf Eyes dogwood a few feet to the left where it gets a bit more light and moisture through a break in the tree canopy: I'll have to think about whether the two different variegations would go together or not. Maybe the golden one could be shifted far enough to the right to give some visual separation while still screening the shed. thyme - my pruning technique for the heptacodium (and most things in the garden) is 'if a branch is in my way when I walk past, lop it off!' :-) Actually the heptacodium tree is an odd shape when viewed from the side. It is planted close to the old cedar clump so the heptacodium had no room to develop branches on the side closest to the cedar. If you look at it in the picture of the front garden from the road you can see that it sort of looks like half a tree! But if you look at it beside the bench in the picture through the iron abour, it looks perfectly normal! That is the way we most often see it so we don't particularly care about the odd look of it from the side.... I doubt that the heptacodium would snap unless perhaps it was in a very exposed place, so if yours has some shelter from wind, I wouldn't hesitate to prune it up a bit. The clematis swag started as a rose swag in an effort to try to control the New Dawn roses that used to grow on the south gate arbour. I loved the rose swags we saw in England and wanted to try one. It was very pretty; but we got tired of those wicked thorns! The Clematis montana on the arbour had started to climb on the swag so that gave us the idea of using clematis as a 'kinder and gentler' alternative to roses for the swag. So far it seems to be working out reasonably well. Copper pipes are handy to work with! Yes, the fence and gate is pipes threaded through a wooden frame. The gate just after we completed it in the garage: If I was doing it again, I'd have painted the wood the Bonsai green of the dark trim on the shed instead of the sage green we used. It is too much of a PITA to repaint it now! I don't treat the pipes at all - they rapidly turn brown so blend in to the plants and disappear. It'll be many years before the copper turns to verdigris green. It would be easy to make a trellis with copper pipes. The big clematis at the back of the garage is on a tripod I made with copper pipes threaded through wooden stretcher bars. The link below will take you to a thread in the clematis forum where I describe how it was built.... The iron arbour and tuteurs are also things I designed and had a local iron craftsman make for me: I like making things - but welding iron is beyond me! :-) Mario said 'if you can draw it, I can build it' - he was fun to work with but is retired now. Thanks mxk3 - green and serene is my major goal - for the backyard in particular. anitamo - the panel idea is a good one - I've given some thought to the possibility of doing something that would create a trompe-l'oeil arbour/gate implying the garden continues into the distance... I think it would take perhaps more work than I want to do at this point so I'll probably go with a tree/shrub if I can. But I still have a yen to do something trompe-l'oeil somewhere....! This post was edited by woodyoak on Sun, Jul 7, 13 at 12:06

Gggrrrrr...must have been a GW quirk that didn't show the January photo when I first re-opened this thread. My apologies for the double post of that photo (I WISH there was some way for the originator of a post to delete it afterwards, as one can on other websites!). Anyway, here's a few photos I found that show a bit more detail on the LH side, upper half, where the two tree roses "Double Delight" and "Delany Sister" reside. This is an older photo and some of these plants didn't work out so were replaced. The little clump of silver-leafed gazania, at the foot of the variegated dianella, was outcompeted by the ceratostigma and eventually died. The vine on the trellis is a purple passiflora. In the above photo, the green groundcover leaning into the walkway, past the second "Ladies in Waiting" pink shrub rose, is Santa Barbara daisy. This is in front of a very pretty mid-height pink-and-white alstroemeria, and surprisingly, has never managed to overrun it. It makes a super companion to the roses when cutting for the vase. This is a more recent photo. Bottom left you can see the "Ruby Comet" argyranthemum. This is an improved descendant of "Ruby Slippers" which was super-tender. "Comet" seems much more hardy, it hardly blinked this winter. That flourishing bright green plant at the foot of "Delany Sisters" is....flat leaf parsley! Worked great and I think I may try to keep one regularly here. It did a great job hiding the tree rose 'legginess'. The small yellow flowers are those of the yellow erysimum, when it was young and sitting up straight, not leaning into the pathway as it does now, LOL:

After cooking on and adjusting my CC for the past four months or so I think I have come to the conclusion, as others have, that you will never get a CC with its current burner configuration to get low enough for most of us regardless of how you adjust the "Simmer" screw or igniters. I am not going to get hung up on the "Book" definition of "Simmer". Why would I make such a bold statement? The CC burner has 92 ports or holes � 36 in the outer ring (39%), 36 in the middle ring (39%) and 20 (22%) in the inner ring. Let�s ASSUME for the sake of the discussion that all of the ports are the same and the output is equally divided between the 92 ports at all settings. Now look at the picture below: As posted at the start of this thread this is how one of my burners is adjusted � no flame in the outer ring and no "Clicking". If you follow my calculations above this means this burner is operating at 61% of the burners total capacity and much lower than most of the burners shown on this thread. This week end I cooked two pot roasts at the same time on the CC. One was in a 6 � qt Lodge enameled, cast iron pot and the other in a 13" aluminum oval roaster. Both had a 3 to 4 pound roast, broth, veggies, etc. On "Simmer" this burner produced a temperature of 205F with more bubbles that I would call a low simmer and the other burner was 207F with bubbles. I believe the 92 or 56 ports (the inner and middle rings) will never be able to be adjusted to produce a low enough Btu output to satisfy the average cook. This is why myself and several others believe that CC will ultimately have to redesign the burner to something like a single 20 port ring (like the inner ring on the current burner) with the appropriate office and air shutter to achieve a true "Low Simmer". I would to see Mr. Kalsi and Capital produce a burner that had a range of something like 100 Btu to 23,000 Btu, but I don�t think it can be done and I know the current burner is no that adjustable. Side Note: Has any manufacturer ever published the Btu output of its burners at its lowest setting? If they have I surly have not been able to find it. All they publish is the MAXIMUM output and I have no idea what the lowest setting is when expressed as a percentage of the maximum.

Hi all, I first want to thank you all so much for your comments and observations. The insight and knowledge on the GardenWeb forums is tremendous and I learn so much. Before I forget, Paul (paul4x4), you commented on the size of the bricks in the living room fireplace. I don't have any idea if the fireplace or chimney was altered. I do know that my chimney guy said that the fireplace/chimney is not large enough to be safe for wood burning--and that it is unlined, so that we should not burn wood in it without having a liner put it. Something about the fact that burning wood would send flames too high into that chimney. I have an update to respond to tzmaryg's comments about what's behind the radiator. Due to a leak in another part of the hot water heating system, the system had to be drained and I took the opportunity to have the plumbers also disconnect the radiator and move it out so I could get behind there. First, there was a plywood-like panel covered with the light color wallpaper that I had removed from the rest of the wall. This panel was just nailed into the white wood of the mantle surround on one side with small nails, so I took those out and pulled the panel away. Here are photos of what I found behind it: Long view--see that dark round-ish patch in the center of the peeling wallpaper? That's a 5" hole going into the chimney!: Close up of hole: Looking through the hole into the chimney: Needless to say, seeing an empty hole going into the chimney sort of freaked me out--even if it has been there for quite a number of years. This chimney takes the gases from the boiler. I had the chimney guy out today to seal it up. If it was a stovepipe for smoke going into the chimney, is it weird that the wallpaper looks like it would have been tucked up right against the pipe at the time? In the close up pic, you can see how the wallpaper goes right up to the edge of the hole. tzmaryg, I was *so* hoping to see some decorative tile behind the plywood panel. :-) Thanks again to all for your input!