I got 3 more of the Big Bluestem 'Red October' because I'm so happy with the one I bought last fall, its stiff with upright leaves. Its already showing color and has deep musky purple stems and turkey feet forming. I figure to really see the color I need more than one plant in the spot. SRG had them marked down but they are back to full price now, I barely got the order in on time. I'm re-doing an area with these planted along with several very tall Little Bluestem I started from seeds I collected here. The bluestem is as tall as the turkey foot this year but I'm expecting the turkey foot to get to its full size when the plants are more mature. There are several new cultivars of Big Bluestem coming out, some nice blue ones but its the dark green that give the red/maroon fall coloring. I like the idea of it contrasting with the light blue Little Bluestem. I also bought Euphorbia 'Ascot Rainbow' to bring the total order up to enough to get the 35% off discount. Andropogon gerardii 'Red October' Close by the Bluestem is an area I'm taking out a large lantana and replacing with these three I have ordered from High Country Gardens. I also ordered a Pawnee Buttes Sand Cherry and a Curly Cue Artemisia. The whole place has gone grass landscape with massed areas I'm working on for definition. Its taking me a while to get this grass landscaping thing down but I'm getting there. Indian Grass 'Thin Man'

Me too. For red---Big Bluestem 'Red October'. Mine already have hints of red. They are slow starters though. Takes a couple seasons as it works on roots under ground. The Red October has very stiff leaves as well (so far, mine are young). I'm thinking maybe the plant form is more elegant than the straight species but time will tell. There is a gas station in the city here with the species type planted in a row. As far as ornamental goes, its just a mass of curving deep green leaves, nothing to look at most of the year. Out on a prairie, you don't even notice them until they send up the tall turkey feet and its those seed head stalks against a blue sky that is the 'wow' factor. Another factor is there is that decorative panicum grass form that you will never get with Big bluestem. Its simply a more decorative grass overall. It gets tall faster, blooms much much earlier and sways beautifully in the wind and looks fantastic when backlit in late afternoon or morning sun. Mine start blooming midsummer providing interest from then until I cut them back in late winter. My answer to this is to plant both. I've got 6 Red October plants in a group planted nearby three types of panicums, each in groups with a swath of little bluestem and blue grama in the foreground. I just thought of one more thing. Big bluestem doesn't have the lovely winter interest you get with the panicum grasses. We don't get much snow here so thats always a consideration for me.

Well Campanula, last winter I stored all my pots in the garage(except for one hydrangea macrophylla 'blue heaven') which included mostly potted conifers, 2 chives, and 2 blueberries. I only watered them like once a month and the freeze/thaw cycle pretty much took care of it moisture wise. So the plants were consistently moist all winter, never absolutely dry. All of them survived with no dieback on any branch either. Now the hydrangea I decided to totally neglect because I didn't really care about it so I left it out on the middle of my patio and it somehow survived the wet winter as well as 0 degree fahrenheit temperature one night. It was in a miracle gro bad draining potting mix as well. It didn't rot! I was completely baffled. This is when I started thinking its either plants are more resilient and tougher than I worry or maybe it might've been just that that winter was just a once in a lifetime miracle where all my plants survived that horrible winter where normally it wouldn't have. Yes a lot of plants I collect are rare or at least not as common as the typical plants you see planted around a non-gardeners homes but I also do have some 'spare' plants that I grow for experimental purposes. Ex: A rubus phoenicolasius I dug up from the woods and divided is in a pot where it has been outside all year getting all the rain and so far it hasn't showed any signs of overwatering. This plant is one of my experimental plants. I also have sciadopitys verticillata in a pot I don't particularly care about which has been outside all year long in the excessive rain and this ones doing fine. I also have bunch of perennials where I don't treat with anxiety because they are so easily propagated I don't need to worry about complete loss. The paranoia I get with gardening is coming from all the stuff I read on the internet(including here) where they make things sound so bad but I don't really know if its true or not.

Unless you say otherwise, I'm presuming that you want these to be single leader, straight trunked trees ...? And that when they're full grown, they'll be many tens of feet tall ... 50', 60', 70', etc....? And that they'll have a canopy whose bottom will clear the ground by at least 10' or more ...? If all that is true, then every branch that exists now will not exist in the finished tree. Relative to that, their only truly important function now is to capture sunlight to feed the main tree, especially the trunk and root system. Only the trunk and roots will exist and therefore, it is the important thing to focus on. A main thing to watch out for is the development of competing trunks that originate during the first several years of the tree's life. Any branch that has vigor and whose direction of growth becomes more vertical than 45*, poses a danger of becoming a competing trunk. I see such a branch in the first picture, coming off of the trunk toward the right, beginning lower down. (Some other pictures have similar situations.) This is nothing to fear or necessarily want to get rid of immediately, because it has a proper role for a while as one of the tree's food factories. But before it gets too large, it must go. If you adopt a general practice of removing the lower branches from a tree as it grows, whatever problems they could potentially bring would be gone as well, resolving the problem of having more than one trunk for example. (BTW, once you get within the adult tree canopy itself, I don't think it much matters that there are multiple trunks. They're not compromising the looks of the tree anyway.) A person can obsess about all kinds of details about plants & their maintenance, but what I find is that doing so tends to get in the way of maintaining trees at all. People don't know when "the best time" to prune them is, so they figure that NEVER is super safe time! In a very general sense, I like to prune woody plants (trees and shrubs) in late winter/early spring BEFORE the new spring growth occurs. But that time could really be extended to anytime in the fall after the plant has gone dormant, which is a huge window of pruning opportunity. Most people don't want to prune in the winter because they think it's not the best look and it's not going to be cured until the plant grows again. If pruned in early spring, the growth happens right afterward and fixes everything. There are some big advantages to pruning in the winter: it's not too hot ... and it can be an unhurried time when there are not other yard chores demanding attention. [Here, I must mention that there are two main divisions of bloom when it comes to woody plants: those that bloom on new wood (current year's growth) and those that bloom on old (last year's growth.) Don't prune plants that bloom on old wood after they've set bed (which is often not long after they bloom.) If you prune them in fall, winter or early spring, you'll be cutting off all their flowers for the current year. Plants that bloom on new wood are more forgiving and pruning anytime from fall to spring usually works ... but just once per year. If you don't care about the flowers of a tree or shrub you can prune anytime. Another thing, the main reason the annual pruning of most woody plants occurs sometime during dormancy is because the spring flush of growth will be forced to put all of its oomph into whatever of the plant remains. If one waited until after the flush of growth, and then pruned a lot of the plant away, they're only going to get a smaller portion of it back. Back to pruning off lower branches, my rule of thumb is to remove all branches that emanate below the middle of the tree's total height ... the lower 50%. That leaves you with half the tree looking normal and half of it is trunk. What happens right afterward is that the tree grows taller and branches more. Within a couple of months of branches being only at the top 50% of the tree turns into them being in the top 60% or even more. If It's a good year, and the tree has water and fertilizer, it could easily be back to a ratio of 70/30 by season's end. The net effect is massaging the tree into upward growth, while inadvertently fixing branching errors along the way.