I have seen this vine in several different shapes. As a shrub, as a trained tree (about 6' tall), as a vine being grown up a wall, etc. I am training one into a 6' tree but it is still staked after several years. I guess it depends on your preference. Whatever you choose, you will have to do quite a bit to train it. Congratulations on being able to root it however. I've heard that it is extremely difficult. Never rooted for me but have many seedlings.

This is a great thread. I'm a teacher (though I only do long-term sub jobs right now), and also GT certified and trained. I've also raised two children, one of whom passed all the GT tests as a kindergartner and is now in college. My other child passed a few of the GT tests as a third-grader, but honestly I don't see her as 'gifted.' Part of the problem is that this school district includes achievement tests in the battery of GT tests, which is completely inappropriate, but there it is. And she is an extremely hard-working kid. Anyway, I've always been hugely interested in GT education and absolutely LOVE working with these students. But I'd like to let you in on a couple of dirty little secrets.... The first secret is that there are many teachers, even GT-certified who don't LOVE teaching these kids. In fact, they often appear (to me) to be defensive and ready to shoot down these kids at every opportunity. I think it is difficult for a parent to truly realize this because they aren't in the classroom. But I have witnessed it over and over again.... It's heartbreaking, and I try to intercede when I can, but that isn't always possible. The second 'secret' is about teachers being expected to differentiate instruction for all the levels in the room. It's a joke. Not because the teacher doesn't try. It's just a ludicrous system. It is politically incorrect to group students by ability, and no longer allowed anywhere that I've found. So a typical classroom has students with IQs below 70 and students with IQs above 125, occasionally very far above. Imagine you are trying to teach 25 children something -let's say .... how to knit. Some of your students have been knitting for four years, and some could not tell you what a knitting needle looks like. While you are trying to figure out how to group them, four boys have grabbed needles and are trying to stab each other, two more have grabbed your balls of yarn and tossed them to each other, which has caused them to unravel of course. The girls are yelling at the boys to stop it. Some are crying because they really, really want to learn how to knit. So you finally bring order to the chaos, and figure you can divide them into three groups, which does not truly correlate to the levels in the room, but is the best you can do. You truly need the entire time with each one of the groups. But you only have 1/3 of the time with each of course. And what do you suppose the other two groups are doing while you are working with one? You have given them some books about knitting to keep them occupied, but they are old and have only black and white photos so that isn't terribly successful. So you start with the least experienced group because they need the most time. After you spend ten minutes with the first group, you will barely have begun your session with the second group before a few students from the first group come running over with problems. And then that happens again. So the second group's instruction takes twice as long as it should because of the interruptions. And since the third group's time was used for the second group, suddenly, there's the bell! Guess which group didn't get attended to AGAIN?!?!? You may remember that I was fairly strong-minded in the original post on this subject -and felt you needed to think about removing your daughter from a toxic environment. If she wants to be at this school and the good outweighs the bad, okay. But from the sounds of it, her educational needs are not being met. Which might be okay if you or she are supplementing them at home. The way I see it, there are two types of needs for these kids. The first set of needs is what she needs to get into a college where she will hopefully truly have her abilities matched to her environment. And the second set of needs is what she needs to feed her hungry brain. The first set of needs could be covered in one year rather than four for most of these kids. When the information is drawn out over four years, boredom and frustration set in, and many GT kids simply begin to tune out. Some lose all of their enthusiasm and interest in learning and begin to fail. And then they can't get into the colleges where they might truly flourish for the first time. As I used to tell my son, don't kid yourself -there are some extremely bright people who never made it to college. There is a whole group of gifted dropouts, mostly boys, who didn't get the first set of needs met. And Anele -it sounds to me as if your daughter IS gifted. The sheer fact that she is interested in reading what you describe is a give away. I hope I haven't offended any one here -I am passionate about the short shrift these very top students are getting in the K-12 system, all over the nation. It is a huge loss to them, and a huge loss to our country. It's mind-boggling to me that we put forth so much time, money and energy to the first-string on the football team, but not to the academic team. Okay, stepping down off the soapbox now....

This post cracks me up! Oh yes, those magazine photos are lovely, but let's get REAL. Tables cluttered with antique goodies, lamps, picture frames etc, well they would've survive one wag of my 70 lb furrkid's tail. Ha! White carpet, what are they thinking? Not everyone can check their shoes at the door, what if you're outside and oops, an emergency potty run? And I'm gonna get beat up about this, but I cannot imagine that horrible stainless steel in my kitchen. My GARAGE maybe! You want to see what it looks like after some use? Go in your local box store and take a look. All those prints and nastiness on it. Ewww! But that's fine, the cleaning lady will deal with that issue. Not to mention, uh oh, a few years from now, whoops, it's dated just like the avocado of the past. What about the bright airy kitchens with no window treatments where the sun shines in full blast. Well that's fine and all but in reality you'll see every little dust particle in every corner of the room 24/7. Not to mention the fading that sunlight will do to your floors as well as your hardwood tables. YIKES! And yes, those open cabinets, I have to dust weekly, I cannot imagine something open like that where you don't dust weekly. And that brings to mind those pot racks too. I have one I don't use. If I have to dust weekly then what are my pots getting on them? Not to mention the dead bugs I'd find. Who wants to wash dishes before using them? Not I. I'm into being practical and REAL. Yes, all these "looks" are trendy and all, but the practicality of the matter just flew out the window. But like I said earlier, it may just be the cleaning lady and the personal chef who are dealing with this issue. Ha!

MSN--"By all means, a phantom smell could mean something serious," says the psychiatrist and nationally recognized smell and taste expert. "It absolutely needs to be evaluated. It could be a tumor that's on the top of your list of things to rule out but it could also be a cyst or some infectious agent housed in the area of the brain where the smell is processed." Brief episodes of phantom smells or phantosmia smelling something that's not there can be triggered by temporal lobe seizures, epilepsy, or head trauma. Phantosmia is also associated with Alzheimer's and occasionally with the onset of a migraine. But it's not typically something sweet that's conjured up by the brain. "It's usually more unpleasant stuff or odors that are hard to describe," says Hirsch. "People will say it's chemical-like or talk about a burning smell."