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....:-)

Love the pictures, Sierra and Savonna. I knew that this topic would be coming up so, when I was in Las Vegas 2 weeks ago I took lots of pictures and these are a few I took that show what lights can do... At night the spotlights shining on this statue at Caesar's Palace really show the horses and their driver with his chariot. The next two pictures were taken inside the Mirage, in front of one of the restaurants. These glass plants were top lit. The first picture is taken without a flash (its a little fuzzy...I needed a tripod) and shows the colors of the glass. The second with a flash captures more of the detail on the glass pieces but not the same color shows up. The next two pictures were taken inside the Harrah hotel. Of course we had to go there to see Toby Keith's Bar and Grill. The first picture was taken with a flash and the auto setting...all the detail shows up. I set the camera onto fireworks, which gives no flash but a longer exposure time and tried to hold still since I had no tripod with me. I like this picture also even though it is a little blurrier. All day long the Bellagio hotel has a water feature set to music that plays every half hour or so. At night the water is lit up. Very well done show! Of course, I realized that the light under the showcase shows the importance of the object (ice cream) it is lighting up. I took these with the auto setting and no flash. They were giving samples away of one of the ice creams shown below. Was it ever hard to choose which ones to try. I came back 3 times while wandering the area and tried... the Fresh Pineapple... and the Chocolate Mouse Pie and the Tiramsu. All were very very good! Brenda

You have some pretty flowers- We are in a bad drought- that plus the freeze at the wrong time this spring sure didn't do any of our plants any good.

Pepper looks just like our neighbor's Black Lab, "Datsun", my dog's best (and only) dogfriend. Nice shots! Julie