I'm glad everything is doing well for you, Aloha, and sorry you can't make it to this year's Spring Swap! Hopefully the Fall Swap will work for you!

With the yarrow, that stuff can be downright invasive, and besides the plants spreading, it can also reseed all over the place, so I recommend you keep an eye on it from the very beginning so you can control it where YOU want it. It'll be much harder to contain if you let it get out of hand on you.

When we first started having swaps I didn't keep track of what I got from who either, but then I always found myself wondering who it was who gave me such-and-such so I started keeping a list. Like you said, the plants "mean more" when you can remember who you got them from, and I love to walk around and go "got that from so-and-so, got that from so-and-so..." Our first swap was in spring of '07, and probably a quarter of the plants I have by now, maybe more, have come from someone at a swap.

About the Iris, I have four of them--three from swaps, and the first two are blooming already! Bigger and better than last year! They are SO pretty!

Skybird

Hear! Hear! Aloha! I am with you about getting plant starts from people you know. Our fruit trees and plants in my parents garden whilst growing up all came from neighbours and friends and we gave away as much as we got both in plants and fruits. To me they are gifts to be treasured. I am much more delighted to see the plants from last years swaps survive and grow than ones I picked up from the nursery and I will always be able to tell a story about receiving them than say I bought them from a nursery. Next I need to plan a few trips out to my in-laws during prime dividing/transplant time. I know it will mean a lot to my MIL and especialy my DH to have some plants from the farm, mainly the peonies he remembers from his childhood. Skybird - you would love my MIL - she is a totally amazing gardener and has heaps and heaps of perennials. Unfortunately they're in Wisconsin so it will take a little bit of planning transporting plant starts. I am also totally amazed and so very happy that the snapdragon seeds I winter sowed last year given by my MIL actually overwintered in the ground!

Snaps are "officially" annuals, Alice, but I always have them overwintering here and there. I NEVER put any in at this house--there were a couple here when I moved in, and since I let them go to seed I now have them kind of all over the place! Mostly I pull them out when they're done blooming because most of mine get rust really badly by then, but there are always some that go to seed before they get pulled out, and the seeds that germinate in fall overwinter and bloom the following summer (a couple of mine are budding already), and sometimes I'll deadhead/cut down ones that aren't coated with rust and even some of the ones that bloomed the previous year will be semi-evergreen over winter and rebloom the next year. I've loved snaps since my uncle, next door, grew "floral" snaps in his greenhouses---LOVE the scent, and love how the different colors have slightly different scents, just like carnations (which he also grew). And they're amazingly "indestructible" too! Every year I have some coming up in the rock mulch--which is on top of landscape fabric--in a hot, sunny corner where I NEVER water, because I don't have anything "planted" there, and they grow and bloom, seemingly without any water at all! I'm always amazed by that! So let the seeds drop where the plants are growing for more next year, or collect some of the seeds and scatter it in other spots--and then ignore it until the next Sniffing Time! Wonderful, carefree things to grow!

Skybird