Thanks for the comments, I'm grinding away on the front yard changes as well now. Taking a break and then it's back out there. One thing at least that is nice about our mild Winters is that when it doesn't rain, we can work the soil. Ken, you are and were right, the grass was eventually all going. It was mildly amusing to mow the lawn for 40 seconds last year once a week. Now I can water for a few years and then leave the maintenance to nature. The deer nibbled off two leaves from a Japanese maple and quickly exitted stage left once I came out to film them. I haven't seen them since - maybe because I'm at about 400 feet elevation, they just don't seem to be around much. Richard, it's Pseudotsuga menziesii 'Fletcherii' - a gem of a dwarf discovered in 1923. :) Edwin, I did indeed, and made many corrections - thank you! I also DO have your nursery list favorited for future access as I make changes and look for confirmations/errors in plants amongst my collection. Are you 100% with every name you list there being accurate? Thanks, as always. Alex, 'Catharine's Golden Heart' will be much more pronounced gold this year with more sunlight. It's previous spot was about 5-6 hours of direct sun, now it's more like 8-10 hours. Bob's golden seedlings, at least those wothout 'Lemon' in their name, don't seem to burn much/at all even with full sun and warm days. Speaking of warm days, I water the pots about once a week during hot stretches, twice a month for the rest. They are doing surprisingly well and since some are very very large, they can stay in their locations, dependant on variety for many years. Some plant ID's. Yes, Abies NORDMANNIANA 'Starker's Dwarf'(caps for emphasis, Iseli is still selling it as Abies koreana) Also from the last photo, the taller fir at the top, Abies forrestii var. forrestii. A Conifer Kingdom product. The fir I noted above for Richard, actually a cultivar of doug fir. The golden spruce is one of Bob's seedlings, I'll need to check the name. It's pouring right now. :( From the second photo, the golden plant towards the bottom is Pseudotsuga menziesii 'El Dorado', a new, VERY choice golden doug fir from Conifer Kingdom. It can burn in full sun, that spot gets about 4 hours and it's brilliantly gold. The large oriental spruce is Picea orientalis 'Skylands'. :) I'll update with more photos as I finish up the front in the next few weeks. -Will

Hi Sheila! I'm going to make a stab at some of your pics., and keep in mind--I'm not an expert like so many others are, but here goes: First one: 'Golden Tiara' ? Second one: Looks like hostafreak's 'Frozen Margarita'? Third: hard for me to tell, it's really so small, yet! Fourth: could it be 'June Fever'? Fifth: pass Sixth: maybe a young 'Krossa Regal'! Twelve: it looks like you might have a 'Honeybells'. front center? What an AWESOME tree trunk!!! Hope it's not a Silver Maple!!! Fifteen: I know what the one on the right is, but can't quite get the name, yet and maybe a 'Pineapple Upside Down Cake' on the left? Twenty: MAYBE a struggling 'Queen Josephine'? I hope I got some of them for you--but you need others to confirm my guesses before you start making labels!! :o)

Maria Elena.....Our Dymo labeller was the old style one I mentioned we had before the Brother one was bought. We found the Dymo labels tended to unstick themselves from whatever after a while, more so from curved surfaces like the tops of electric plugs (the front face has raised lettering on so couldn't stick labels there) and even from some flat things too. Perhaps because the tape was rather thick and rigid...? Also the machine wasn't that efficient in embossing, sometimes it didn't print all parts of a letter, on other occasions it failed to move the tape through and printed two characters on top of each other! Plus it was a pain dialling up each character with that wheel type arrangement having to keep spinning it back and forth through the whole alphabet. It was OK at the time I guess as there wasn't anything else, but now there is! Looking at the two prices quoted above and their similarity......Brother gets my vote in this instance! Gill

Thanks everyone! It wasn't that hard, just time consuming. I've always kept an alphabetical inventory since the beginning. I used that to help me decide where to plant things in the new bed that first year. After that the inventory just became a habit. I also was showing roses back then and needed very accurate records so I could put the proper exhibition names on them for shows. So I just had to go throug h each year's inventory one by one to find a photo of each rose for each year. I can now go back quickly and see if I've grown a particular rose and see what it looked like and how long I had it for. Generally speaking once I see the bloom I can remember how it grew. One I remembered how much I liked was Hollywood Star bred by John Sheldon. It was a beautiful rose with fairly good disease resistance. While it lasted three seasons in my garden none of John's beauties are particularly hardy for me. I tried O'Rilla, (gorgeous color), Strawberry Romance, (loved the phototropics) and Hopie Girl, (pretty soft yellow) and none of them last more than 1 or 2 seasons. So in the end I gave up on them. One I was glad to be rid of was JFK. I had it for three years too and in those three years I could only find 2 pictures of an open bloom and those both had balled centers. But I had DOZENS of photos of gorgeous long white buds...they just never opened here in my humidity. In the early days most all of the roses were HTs. I only had one mini for the first 3 years and that was Wild Plum which I inherited from my Mom. I see now that I have fewer and fewer HTs and quite a lot of minis instead. So I can see that my tastes have change there. I also have several OGRS that Mom never would have had in her garden. She was a loyal J&P fan back in the 50s & 60s when they were at their peak and she bought HTs exclusively. Back then you never even heard of David Austins over here in the USA. I remember when she got the first catalog from them some time in the early 90s. We sat on the sofa together drooling at the gorgeous photos in it. She did pick out one to purchase. I don't remember which one it was but whatever it was they didn't send that one and sent her Golden Celebration instead. The one I still have!