Why, oh, why would I want to keep track of my expenses? What if my husband saw it!?! I have been assuring him for years that I get the majority "free" on some sort of loyalty incentive program. He is not stupid, but the lie comforts us both and provides marital harmony. Actually, good luck with keeping track of your expeditures. I obviously don't, but gardening is my one splurge. I am willing to wear old clothes, continue driving my swamp car, and dye my own hair (although if any of you actually know me--this is totally my natural hair color as I am certainly not going gray!). I put costs in equivalent number of roses to decide what gets fixed: 3 months of hair dye--one rose, fixing swamp car's blinkers--10 roses; buying new car--way, WAY too many roses. So far, I get hair dye, but keep swamp car without useable blinkers.

I have about three hundred varieties of roses and about five hundred plants, and I'm not nearly as organized as I should be. For me, and I guess for anyone who has a lot of roses, multiple strategies are essential. I have my roses listed on HelpMeFind under the name "Il Giardino ai Papa". This list is mainly for those who want to know what roses I have (for exchange purposes, for example) so that I won't have to mail either a computer file or a bulky paper list. Then I have my critically important Excel spreadsheet, sorted by rose class, then rose name, and including plant source, ease of propagation by cutting, and space for comments. I don't keep information here that I can readily access elsewhere. I have a paper printout of my spreadsheet that I take notes on, and I update the spreadsheet online annually, generally a job for late fall when I know what has survived a year in the garden, as we also plant at this time. I have a garden notebook, much neglected lately, but in which I keep all my plant orders and invoices of shipments received. Labeling the rose is where I break down. I keep the nursery labels on the plant, then, at least in theory, I add a more permanent label, in my case using ones made of Tyvek, available in a roll of 1000, and written on in pencil. I've used aluminum labels that you impress with a stylus of some sort, but have found that they're hard to see on the plant, especially the many-caned, leafy, once-flowering old roses. The pencil-written Tyvek labels are durable, but they get lost, disappear in the foliage, have to be shifted to a new cane when the old one dies or is pruned away...all kinds of things happen. So maps are important. I have some of my garden mapped and need to map much more of it, plus update the maps I have. All this is complicated by mis-named roses. Roses arrive mislabeled by the nursery; or they've been in commerce for years or decades with a wrong name; or cuttings come from friends, named, misnamed, or with no name at all; or mystery roses arrive to take up residence, with no one involved having any idea at all what variety they are. These roses add considerably to the confusion. (I mostly have old and older roses, where these problems are perhaps more common than among modern varieties.) Melissa

Re rugosas: My son recently said that the sweetest smell he knows, because it reminds him of his happy chidlhood, is the smell of rugosas mixed with the smell of chlorine! He explained that it is because the local public swimming pool is surrounded by rugosa hedges. He used to go there every day in summer. Niels, I probably never saw your post, but the Skagen painters mean almost as much to a Swede as to a Dane. It is part of our cultural heritage, too, and several Swedish artists spent time at Skagen. I have just retired from work and almost the last thing I did while still at work was to carry my framed print of a Hammershøi painting to a colleague who had admired it. I know Vilhelm Hammershøi was not a member of the Skagen colony but I somehow connect him to them although he mostly painted interiors. It's something about the light, our very soecial Nordic light. Finland has this same light, of course, and Hanna Pauli captures it in this iconic painting that really appeals to Scandinavians. No rose though. Here is a link that might be useful:

Basic proportions? You can go by Fibonacci or the golden rectangle, which roughly leads to proportions of 1.62:1 as being pleasing to the eye. Those proportions can either be vertical or horizontal. Example, you want a 36" high vanity. Adhering tightly to the golden rectangle would lead to the vanity being about 22" deep and 58" long. 36:22 fits the 1.62 proportion, as does 58:36. If you wanted a 40" high mirror, make it 24" wide and you again hit the 1.62 ratio. You can carry the rectangle relationship through the design. Example, the front of the vanity can be a 1.62 ratio. The doors and drawers can be 1.62 ratio. Sometimes you can blend the whole thing together. Sometimes you take it to a certain point then have to abandon the ratio. But that's the basic idea of the Golden Rectangle when it comes to proportion. There are goose neck faucets that may allow you to get the wet head look. Or you can go with a wall mounted spout, either a regular spout, r perhaps a waterfall type spout. Depends. but dipping a head might give you too much splash out. Again, it depends on how far the spout projects away from the backsplash or over the bowl. You can look at trough sinks, they lean towards wider bowls. If the bowl is sloped where the water hits the bowl, that'll help to minimize splash out. Water height and the angle of incidence of the water hitting the bowl surface are things to consider.