Thanks, trospero. I agree, but my son is giving me his tablet. We finally drove over to Wal Mart, and bought a lap top. I don't know how to be wise about electronics. I purchased phone that I thought was all that I needed, and now realize that in my school, I really needed a smart phone or something more high tech so that I can receive communications from my students. Frankly, I think that is the worst idea they have ever come up with for teachers, but nobody hears me. Sammy

Sorry beng, but thanks for the update. I wonder if Longwood does anything to keep their beautiful larch trees alive in SE PA. I think like knowing how sausage is made, you aren't really supposed to know what they might or might not do in terms of chemical treatment. There is a tree in a private garden west of Harrisburg. It's always been growing in the shade of pines so perhaps that kept its root run cool and relatively dry...? OTOH there has been solid evidence of a handful them still growing well in parts of the deep south like Alabama. I once analyzed the records of - who was it, MIssouri Botanic Garden? I can't even remember now - and noticed that, just as I suspected, the ones to have survived there long-term were grown from seed collected in Japan. The ones that died probably came from European forestry sources = inbred. No current seed vendor has seeds collected in Japan, and many hours spent in google translator to try to locate a Japanese native seed seller were unsuccessful; the US horticulturalist living in southern Japan who posts to various other boards told me he had never encountered any interest in selling seeds of most native species. According to him, In the very rare case someone wants a wild plant there, they just go dig one up.

I'm on Safari for Mac right now and today I'm suddenly seeing those related discussions thumbnails in between the posts, rather than on a sidebar, like they used to be displayed... Looks like they might be trying to get people to click on them more often, but it sure doesn't seem like a smart idea to me...

Thats a good tip. Although what a bizarre implementation on their part!!! I think what is happening is that they have blurred the line between Forum (a/k/a Topics) and Discussions. All that really exists is discussions with keywords. Forums don't really exist anymore. It is all just keyword searches. It would be nice if the search bar had a way to search for text strings OR keywords. For example if I search for "clematis" (because I know there is a Clematis "forum"), I come up with discussions that have "clematis" in the subject line of all discussions. Only the 4th discussion down shows me the Clematis forum is listed in the list of keywords for that discussion. I see the problem is they have no way to represent a "forum" in the search results. So that's why they should have a separate way to search for just forums/keywords. (former software designer frustrated by bad software design)