tom, Is perhaps your ground waterlogged from all the rain we've received lately? I ask b'c with waterlogged soils the plants can't get oxygen or nutrients and so wilt and then the leaves turn yellow. Also, Yellow Pear is quite susceptible to Early BLight ( A. solani) but you haven't described any lesions on the leaves that go a long with that, and EB doesn't show wilting anyway, as a symptom. But if we're talking just this yellow Pear and the others of the same variety are fine right now then perhaps one might start thinking about a seedborne disease. Are all the Yellow Pears being grown in the exact same area and receiving the exact same treatment? Carolyn

Sorry if I gave the impression I was sneering, but I was really just curious. Getting "say" out of "sette" seemed strange. All I could think of was that period in the 80s or 90s when it became popular to "frenchify" the store name Target to Tar-ZHAY. And with well known examples like Antoinette or Annette, it seemed odd that "say" would come up. As far as the pronunciation of Noisette goes, anything is possible, but I wonder if it has simply been anglicized or partially anglicized. There are a lot of French names where I live, including my own, Lavergne, which have been anglicized. Even though I know full well my last name should be pronounced Lah-vair-nyuh, I pronounce it Luh-vern as in Laverne and Shirley as does everyone else I know, including my French speaking family. The ONLY time I might hear someone say it the "right" way would be if a really old French speaker asked my name, and they repeated it back to me in French deliberately as if they were saying, "This is who you REALLY are." The same goes with a lot of the other names around here like Bertrand, Daigle. There are others, though, that are still mostly pronounced the French way: Hebert, Trahan, Savoie, Angelle. However, if you travel ninety miles or so north or west of this area, you hear them being anglicized to Hee-burt, Tray-han, Suh-voy, etc. And sometimes, of course, they will pronounce it differently whether or not they know if the other person is from a French speaking background or not. My great grandmother was a Latiolais. So to some people she was a Latch-oh-lay, to others lah-tee-oh-lay. Then there are cases like Begnaud where the first half is anglicized, but the second half is still pronounced "oh" rather than "awd" which I guess would be how someone with no French would go for. This reminds me of a day in French class. We were reading passages from Madame Bovary, and someone pronounced her name to rhyme with ovary. Oh boy, the look on Madame's face was just as if someone had drawn fingernails across a blackboard. She stopped them and said, in French of course, "Please, please! It's Boh-vah-REE, not Bovary," and she rhymed it with ovary and drawled it out in such a funny way that we were all laughing.

Kay, there are so many posts being put up that I missed this one! I started to post some of my late ones but I can hardly keep up with what everyone else is posting without posting more!! I have some reblooming as well. One of those is a Maryott whose name I cannot remember while sitting here that has five rebloom scapes on it and I don't care because it did not give me one unsplotched bloom or even one bloom fully open this year. It is probably going to find a new home somewhere this year as I have had the same problem since it has been here. I really like your Blue Ribbon and great that you have blooms on your new one. Jello Roll Morton performed well for you this year. I do wonder if we will have a rebloom season like last year?!! I kinda hope not if this heat keeps up. Not just for my sake but for the lilies as well! Kate

Very funny!