on self control =)

It was sunny and in the balmy 40s today. Great weather for the hard work of trimming the trees.

You and John_Benoot with the trimming of the trees. I had to do it last month. What kind of trees do you have to trim? I hope not a zillion Weeping Willows to pollard with chainsaws.

Green Ash, Purple Ash, Golden Maple, Amur Maple, River Birch & another flowering one that I've lost the name of. The Green ash & Amur maple were platting together to steal too much sun from my beloved flower beds--overlapping limbs need to go. The others all like to grow extra branches up the inside and ruin the air flow. My DH and his trusty chain saw helped alot with lower branches. I had to reach, saw & clip other suckers up high on the trunks. And the "dwarf crab apple" the local nursery planted too close to my house needed limbs trimmed that were rubbing the second story of our house & porch roof. Dwarf 20 footer? I think not!

Ah, those mismarked plants. I do love them.

I have a larger than expected crabapple too close to the house to. It will stay here until it's too big and then I'll take it out.

The nursery delivered a purple clematis "Niobe" last spring. At least it was blooming and I could tell it was wrong. Those Dwarf flowering crabapples are so lovely. Especially the weeping ones. Unless you wanted a fruiting crabapple.

You have a few really tall trees to prune. Ash, maple, riverbirch. You have a lot on your hands. Glad that the work is done and the sun can shine down on your garden.

I'm afraid we will have to use professionals in the future. Too tall for me & I'm not coodinated enough to climb a tree these days.

Especially those River Birch. Those are tall puppies and you can't climb them anyway. My tree man climbs trees in contests for a hobby. I didn't even know that there was such a thing as a tree climbing contest. But I let my birch go in front of my living room. There is dense shade there but I grow a shade garden. My living room sits high - but there is an unattractive house across the street and the birch change with the seasons. I love to watch the birds there. It's like living in the trees.

I have trimmed our river birch so the bottom leaves are above my head when I mow. I like to see the beautiful trunk and the leaves give an ever-moving dappled pattern of shade in season. The higher branches also allow for sun to get thru to a lily bed beside it.

I'm a birch junkie Wanda. I just put in some "Crimson Frost" where I had to take some diseased Mimosas out. They are babies now but when the sun comes through the leaves it's like stained glass. And the most expensive kind - Red. I grow Cineraria, Ferns violets, azaleas, camellias and correa (australian fuschia) under mine. But lilies are worth it.

Do you know why red stain glass is the most expensive? I watched them make it on the Isle of Murano near Venice. You have to add real GOLD to the mixture to get red. The deeper the red, the more gold you need.

Pretty pricey. But I guess that if it's the only way to get red...I did stained glass for awhile and believe me, you tried to design everything with as little red as possible. But a little red can go a long way.

Doss, what sort of thing did you design? Lamp shades, windows?

I made pieces to hang in windows with all kinds of glass and I did picture frames for 8X10s and larger that were fun using opaque glass. The proportion of the pieces I made was always related to the window so I never made them for big windows.

It's been a long time now. Then I did pottery and then art quilts for quite some time and knitting, but I can't use my hands very well now because of the meds I'm taking so this artsy craftsy person designs her garden instead. At this point I'm really not doing too much designing, just finding places to experiment with Dahlias and Iris. It's interupting some of the beautiful compositions but I'm happy with it right now.

I used to won an antique business and repair stained glass lampshades. I bought old chrch windows for the glass. Broken ones were VERY cheap & the glass was still usable.

When we bought this house, I liked the light of the front octagon window, but I didn't like the lack of privacy. I had small children then & not much time, so I designed a window & had a local guy make it. The colors are wonderful to see each time I use the stairs.

Moonglow - go ahead and order them! You only live once!!!

Wanda - your window is quite lovely. Now that's the size of a window to tackle. We have quail in our part of the world too and I love to see a whole family of them walking down our fence. Now that we have Zora and she barks so much, who knows if I'll just have to see them skittering across the street.

I love to look at quail , Walker the Wonderdog likes to find them and DH likes to shoot them.

Oh, no! We'll have to take DH out into the woodshed and give him what for! Poor little birds. I guess each to his own.

I've done all of my Iris ordering so now even looking is out of the question. I guess that I'm just going to have to weed and plant, divide and watch things grow until August. Not a bad thing. Oh, and of course cut lots and lots of Dahlias. I'm not even going to look at Sutton's. NOW let's see how much self control I have.

Wait a second, prayiong for self control &ordering is fine, but is your iris bloom season done already? How about letting us drool over the iris you have NOW?

You bet, 'Las Vegas' is blooming now and 'Aaron's Rod'. I'll photo them today if I can catch the light right. Other than that, you've seen 'Concertina' and 'Glistening Icicle'. It's early in the season here and I have lots and lots of buds. Today I have to get back to cutting out more leaf spot - on 100 Iris. I'm ashamed that I let it get this far. Now I do have to get out the fungicide. I don't have time to wait for more gentle means because leaf spot can kill the entire rhizome. But first I have to cut out all the diseased leaves with sterilized shears. What a pain.

I've never had this problem before - too much rain. Learn something new all the time.