Interested in the elderberry, I checked your list and I am also interested in buckwheat (edible type), Canby raspberry, heirloom anasazi (corn?), sesame, hyacinth beans. I have blackberry plants, Passiflora incarnata (maypop), lemon trees, perennial chocolate scented sunflowers (Helianthus tuberosus)(edible tubers) aka Jerusalem artichokes. prickly pear cactus, moon and stars watermelon seeds.

One time I was off surfing the web when I stumbled upon a website. It was an exchange between people studying the climate in Afghanistan and Montana. So they said, climatic change effects mountainous places first. In 1987 we got hit with a drought for three years which they said was as bad as the Depression years. 100,000 people left the state. Our population was reduced to 900,000 and we lost one of our two congressional representatives. It has taken 20 years to rebuild that population though lots of people move here. They just don't stick it out. Most of these people come to the western third of the state.(green) Meanwhile, the eastern half of the state(brown) is emptying out due to pressure from drought and Canadian beef and wheat. There is one county which only has 600 people. In '87-89, we saw temperatures in the 70's in February, and began to get grasshopper storms. They ate everything in the yard and then began to eat the pine needles off the trees last. I remember in '88, opening the newspaper and reading there was a 30 acre fire in Yellowstone Park. It was late June. According to the new age philosphy, they said they were just gonna let it burn. By September the skies were completely black. Streetlights came on in the middle of the day and they closed the schools. We were all completely sick from smoke inhalation, and it took a couple of months to get well. It took another 12 years to get them to abandon the LIB policy, thought up by people back east with a comfortable 30 inches of precipitation per year. However, they still don't have the manpower or resources to do a good job of fire-fighting All we need are helicopters to stop most fires. After '88 the climate got progressively drier for 20 years, and I kept thinking about what my college history professor said. K. Ross Toole said the west got hit with a cyclical drought every 50 years which lasted 20 years. Really, though it seemed like climate change here began like a thin red line in 1980, the year Mount St. Helens erupted. Every winter got a little more drier. This year, though, the snowpack is at 7 feet in the mountains, the first normal snowpack in a long, long time. And it has been 20 years since the Yellowstone fires. If you think about it, why should global warming affect precipitation? After all, jungles are hot, and get all kinds of rain. When I was a kid, they said sunspots were causing abnormally cold winters. Awhile back, I read that sunspots occurring on the side of the sun which faces us causes the opposite. So sunspots need to be on the side which faces away from us to punch up Old Man winter. I haven't read whether that is occurring, though, and have no idea if that theory even holds water. It's snowing right now, just what the doctor ordered. and like most garden nuts, I JUST WANT IT TO GO AWAY.

We've been here 9 years now, a duplex in a historical monument made from homes built for shipworkers in WWII, on landfill in San Francisco Bay. The same family had lived there for the entire time and the father grew a few yellow roses when he lived. When we got there it was 18 inches of clay covered grass. We simply dug holes to begin with and I interred my first 20 hybrid teas. Second thought, we built 8 inch high raised beds, spread them with every delicay and plowed them into the clay which the roses liked. I discovered own roots and ogrs about the same time. Over the last 9 years roses have been added, subtracted, different companion plants and CA natives added, gophers run off, hundreds of lady bugs added, thrip eating nematodoes, bird baths etc. I hardly spray a thing anymore. Plants that can't take it are gone. The high qulity prepared mulch that I buy and add by the yard, twice a year has made the soil delicious. It is my only fertilizer and the roses love it. The garden has become a living entity. The husband has become a loving gardener although some points of view are still at odds. Now we live in it. People walk by and tell me how beautiful it is and then murmer "so much work." Ya gotta do something in your life, growing beautiful flowers causes enough pleasure to be worthwhile. I love it more and more as the plants grow big, hummingbirds come to approve each time I water, the bees gently drone and the lady bugs seem to agree to eat all the aphids. I don't know what will happen to it when I go but for now it is a celebration and a testimonial to what roses do well in this part of northern CA. You have explained the process very well. Gotta go plant another geranium--they go with roses here. la

Cath, I think 'Ice Follies' does well everywhere: it grew here for years until overwhelmed by a prostrate ceanothus, and was one of my major survivors in Washington too. As my taste has developed I've become less impressed with its looks, though. The trumpets I find a bit surprising, though I don't know why; the feral daffodils one runs across here are mostly of that same type. 'Ice Wings' is another Triandrus hybrid, I notice it has received the RHS's Award of Garden Merit. I'm getting fond of Triandrus daffodils. Bart, good luck! Who knows, your cedar may perform wonderfully. I can only report about trees growing in local conditions, and those can be summed up in one word: clay. Ingrid, Gardening is certainly a tempering experience. No sane person would want to deal with the conditions you're fighting now, but they're forcing you to keep on thinking and planning. I wonder what the native California flora might have to offer you? principles of desert gardening as developed in the Middle East, northern Africa, Spain? Here we're still waiting for fall to arrive. It was downright hot yesterday, and sticky, with the sun finally visible after nine days of clouds and rain. Temperatures are supposed to drop this coming week, the sky to clear entirely, and I should think the humidity level will drop as well, and thank goodness. I'm still getting chigger bites and have allergy symptoms. We finished filling in the 70-80 holes we had dug, stuffing them with hay and the dirt that had been removed. It was a heavy job. Last week's rain watered everything nicely, and when it gets a bit cooler we'll be able to begin planting the rooted roses, with my attention particularly focused on those grown from suckers I collected last winter. These are once-blooming European OGRs, mostly Gallicas and Damasks. We have some warm climate roses to get in the ground too, but their holes still need to be prepared, and it's going to be a slow business. And there are a lot more chores. The (mostly) OGR varieties I propagated from suckers are the following: 'Agar' 'La Ville de Bruxelles' 'Petite Orleannaise' 'Duchesse de Berry' 'Nouvelle Pivoine' 'Incomparable' R. gallica 'Splendens' 'Gloire de France' 'Miranda' 'Belle de Crecy' 'Kazanlik' 'Winchester Cathedral' 'Mme. Zoetmans' 'Celsiana' Celestial' 'Nuits de Young' 'Nestor' (?) 'Elisa Rovella' 'Leda' R. foetida 'Persian Yellow' 'Austrian Copper' Of the Petrovic order from two years ago we may have lost as many as a quarter of the total (I think that tends high: I haven't checked the whole line yet), which still leaves us with sixty-odd new varieties. I'm still back-filling holes to bury the grafts deeper, digging out the occasional cursed rootstock sucker, and cleaning around the plants. They'll need to be nursed along for at least a couple of years yet, but they're on their way. Our losses were mostly in two low areas of the bed, which we found out were low when we got the wettest winter imaginable after planting the roses. In these areas we've been building up the planting sites and trenching around them, always amending generously with old hay. The grass and clover this fall are wonderful. Melissa