Marian - the paper size is 11"x17" for the course but I gather in 'real life' it would be at least 24"x36" or bigger... Mary - I have noticed the ads for the English Gardening School in the RHS magazine. And there are the RHS courses too... I guess one advantage of the U of G courses is you can just take the courses that interest you and they can count towards a certificate/diploma or not, as you like. So there no feeling that you didn't complete a program if you want to stop after just one course. The Internet format was ideal for me; it's just that the course content wasn't quite what I was looking for. I'll have to look around at options and then see whether I'm still in the mood to do something more once the gardening season is over for this year. Saucy - The reference to the clematises is in the verbal description of the plan. You need the plant list key to find them on the drawing (and the drawing posted here is too small to read the numbers anyway! :-) GB - I was going to consult with you about what ones to use but ran out of time and just named ones I was familiar with! The transparent house was interesting. I had to 'build' it from scratch with only the floor plan outline, the height of the walls as provided by the teacher, and the fact that there was a 2' roof overhang! It's not quite right I think on the back part of the house but good enough for the purpose of the assignment. The whole isometric drawing thing is actually quite simple to do - if a bit fiddly and tedious! You follow a straightforward process using fairly crude shapes for the plants (drawn to scale based on mature height and spread) and, when you put it all together, it produces that rather astonishing drawing - with zippo artistic talent required on my part! Since it was all done at a scale of 1/8" = 1' small details were killers to work with. It took me two days to draw that table and tuteur! Rotating things 30 degrees when they're that small and have so many lines (all those chair legs etc.!) is hard on the eyes... And since the technique produces a 3-D effect, I kept losing track of what was bottom and what was top as the little image seemed to have a life of its own and 'morphed' a lot :-) And tilting everything at 30 degrees started to 'get' to me - when I was reading something after working on the drawings for a while, the text of what I was reading seemed to be on a slant! But it was mostly fun - and good mental exercise :-) But now it's time to mess around in the real garden! I do hope to get out and measure things next week and do a proper scale drawing of the front garden and the changes I want to make there. (I suspect I may end up just 'winging it' as usual if spring gets underway quickly sometime soon and I run out of planning time....:-)

Khandi, your news report states that parents must let their children fail and experience the consequences in order to succeed in university. Parents must let their children FALL, not fail. Meaning if their work/grades are not always up to par, it's up to the child to do better through self-discipline not because the parent is pushing/punishing them to do better. It also says that high school students are NOT punished for handing in late assignments and are able to slack off in the beginning of the semester and make up for it later. Please explain to me then, where are the consequences? That's the point! In high school, at least here, there are no consequences for handing in late assignements; therefore, students do the same in university not realizing that things are different in university... there are consequences! None from the parents and none from the school means kids like Lisonwal's son get by on their brains until they hit university. THAT is when they fail. Because there are no consequences in high school for handing in assignments on time, it's upsetting for those students who do make the effort to ensure that they meet the deadline. They have good work habits, organization, self-discipline... yet those who slack off and hand in assignments late get to have the same grade as those who didn't. They don't get penalized for it. In my day, we got marks taken off for every day that the assignement was late. You see... years ago, you needed grade 13 to go on to university, grade 12 for college. The government eliminated grade 13 and expanded the curriculum. Also something about lowering the dropout rates, etc., they changed the grading procedures or something. It's my guess that's why there's no consequences... not a good thing! Help him learn these skills, even if he doesnt "need" them yet to achieve decent grades. He WILL need them later and he wiill thank you for it. Exactly, but what the therapist is saying is that once they are in high school, let them learn it on their own without a parent's constant reminder because you won't be their to remind them all the time when the child is in university. They need to learn time management/organization BEFORE university. Teach them in elementary and then let them exercise it in high school. When my daughter was elementary school, I was there to help her with her homework, making sure she was on top of her work, etc. Did the same for her first 2 years of high school. Now, I don't bother. I have to keep reminding myself NOT to get involved in her homework (if it's being done, etc.) because it's up to her to do it...not me! She'll see the consequences of her actions for herself, knowing it was her own decisions that brought her to this place or that place, not because of me. Our family therapist told us last year when parents are too strict with their teenagers, once those teenagers are in college/university, they go wild! A good number of them get caught up in drinking/drugs/partying, etc., which is why she has several patients who are university students. My daughter was a student who handed in her assignments on time and would get pissed off when students who handed theirs in late would get same grading as her without consequences. She'd often say "why bother then?". I'd explain why, telling her that those students are gonna learn the hard way later on. Just last week in school, my daughter was saying how most of the students in her 12th grade history class (she's in 11th grade) didn't know how to take notes while watching a film/movie. The teacher had the students watch a film/movie and take notes. Daughter said they kids didn't know what to write while she was writing down whole bunch of stuff, so the teacher stopped the film and got the books out instead. My daughter's comment was "how are they going to take notes in university?"

Thank you all for your kind remarks! I think you all would have a wonderful time visiting this place...I go there often...It is so beautiful all around and end up taking gads of pictures. I guess you could say Beaver Creek State Park is becoming like a family member...

Beautiful! A nice change from the blue lupines of Texas. Kt