Plantmaven- Your garden pictures are so beautiful...but that little bird is just charming :) Gardenweed- Your peonies are lovely. We have some that came with the place that look very similar...and they have a nice fragrance. Thyme- Your garden is so pretty! I'm looking forward to seeing all your new veggies, next summer. Freezengirl- I do have Walker's Low catmint. It's in the kitchen garden. For some reason, the barn kitties leave it alone out there, but when I try to plant it closer to the house...disaster! LOL That's one reason I have so much lavender. Wren-garden, I have my blueberries mixed in with everything else, but I don't put acid on my soil, either. If you decide you need to add acid, then they'll look great with azaleas, rhodedendrons and hydrangeas (if you like the blue ones). I don't grow any of these (the first two are poisonous to horses) but I'm pretty sure they all like acid soil. Think about what else would grow under/with pine trees. As for deer...they can be a challenge, but ours are so darn cute, we try to make the garden work with them, rather than trying to get rid of them. I've read all deer are different, depending on where you live, how many they are (how hungry they are) and if there are so many...they just devastate everything. That being said, we've had good luck with butterfly bushes, lavender, catmint, bee balm, daisies, coneflowers, cosmos, marigolds, zinnias, peonies, daffodils, lilacs, plum trees, clematis, columbine, pansies, and mints. Hope that helps your sister, a bit :)

Just thought I would expand on what Christine said earlier about people driving up the price of online auctions and additionly what Mike has said. What is done by a couple of sellers mentioned thus far is that they pay as little as $5 to buy a 4" pot wholesale (This is also done by website sellers, but they offer a fixed price) and then either immediately or after growing them on for a season, they sell them at acution on ebay. Sometimes, a seller may have some stock plants of common nursery varieties the he grafts himself, but orders in the new plants he does not have stock plants for. So when we go into an auction, the value of that auction for a first year plant is in obtaining a very low price. Additionally, some sellers will ship at very reasonable prices, but others are much too high in my opinion. So when we drive the price of these often very small plants up, we pay nearly as much as we would from someone who sells maples though a hosted website (Wildwood, Mountain Maples, Eastwood). This is where I feel it is better to turn to a web-based nursery than persist with ebay auctions. Even those that have nurseries like Jherter and Nishikimaplesman choose to sell through ebay and the reason being is that more times than not, they will average higher prices in the auctions. Some will even fudge a bit to call a plant a two year tree when it is not. If we are going to spend $30-50 then we might as well establish with an online nursery that will guarantee their plants and is ethical enough to sell through a web-based business. As much as ebay wants us to feel it is a business, it is not! It can be enjoyable to buy from ebay in the winter when not much else is happening and I buy during the growing season also. But I also frequent local nurseries in Oregon. So in anycase, whether or not we buy from ebay, it is nice to have a balance between local sellers where we can go and see the trees and buying online. It is only in going to an actual nursery that we will learn about the plants and those that care enough to propagate them. Establishing an entire collection over ebay is something that I would not enjoy as I would miss the interaction with the growers and nurserymen who also love maples. Of course there are unfortunate areas of the country where local establishments are not accessible and thereby it is understandable to have to use online sellers only. There is something said for establishing relationships and I do not believe that will be done on ebay--it is about the money to be had by auctioning trees. As Mike said in different words, it is "Buyer Beware" and now with this thread, equally as interesting, "Seller Beware!" I have had equally good and bad experiences with almost every seller mentioned here so far, but I will say that Cedric (Bonsaibob) seems to know the most about maples and had the best communication practices--problem is that his enhanced photography seems to lead to a higher frequency of auctions where the price is driven up. There is no reason to pay those kind of prices unless we feel there is no other avenue to obtain the plant and we have to have it. MJH

I'm not sure about liners or Japanese maple seeds but they do have jiffy pots & things nurseries use, as well as bulk seeds. I've ordered from them twice with no problems. It's R.H. Shumway >>>>www.hpsseed.com. You can also try the following for seeds: lonniesbulkseeds.com vegetableseedwarehouse.com www.homeharvestseeds.com www.katzkuntrykuttins.com www.crosmanseed.com www.superseeds.com Hope these help! Good luck!

Welcome to Texas :-) You asked: "Also, How do citrus trees do in Austin? which ones do best, which ones do not do well?" My friend Linda M. says icicles hung for days off of her "Changsha Mandarin" trees for days and they were not damaged in the least. It is very a very reliable winter hardy tangerine. Here is a picture of one at Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio. The lady there said their trees are about 9 years old. Click on thumbnail for a larger view: They are very sweet, very easy to peel and have a few seeds. Several of us stood around eating and spitting seeds -- LOL ... at ARE a couple of days ago when the picture was taken. Satsuma's are probably more readily available, but not as reliably hardy, but everybody goes for them because they are seedless. I have both, but they are young trees and have not produced yet. There are pictures of full size specimens of both Changsha and Satsuma on the Texas Gallery in the thread about the San Antonio Botanical Center. Here is a thread about winter hardy citrus that was on the GW Citrus Forum. Happy Texas Gardening! Here is a link that might be useful: Winter Hardy Citrus Thread - Citrus Forum