So, what happened with your Hadspen entry? What have you heard?

Briggs: This is my first visit to your site and I find it refreshing to hear another West Coast view. I blog from just down the coast in Santa Barbara, and spent a few years as a landscape architect in the SF / Oakland / Walnut Creek area. As lackluster as fall appears in the Bay area, I miss the range of plants I used to have in my tool belt when designing just over the hills for places like Lafayette, Tracy and Pleasanton.

Down here there ain't much color change except for a few Liquidambar and Pistacia.

But I wrote to laud your eloquence and gentle writing style. I'll be back for more visits and hope you might check out my writing at my blog (http://gardenwiseguy.blogspot.com) as I'm trying to digest more West Coast insights to counter-balance all the midwest, east coast content I tread through in most garden blogs.

Today's entry is about our So. Cal fires raging and hoping to educate people about fire-safe practices. I'm sure the Oakland fire is still a devastating memory for the East Bay. Perhaps more effort needs to be made to make people aware of defensible space concepts.

Nuff for now - gotta pick up the kid.

To answer Kathy - no, I did not make it to the final cut for the Hadspen garden competition. And I don't yet know who did as they have informed us they will post the conclusion on their website at the end of October (soon now, I hope).

And thanks to Billy for sending a link to his great website - and garden insights from beautiful Santa Barbara. Which reminds me that I still have to visit the amazing Lotusland there...