gg5 said:Lynn good question!! I am planning to plant mine this fall, but I have to clear out and amend to soil so its quicker draining. Currently there are california poppies and other wild flowers there, but having a mix of sedum and poppies and upright sedum could be very pretty!! That's my plan, to make a sedum garden area (I especially love ground cover sedum - need to uprights for their height in the background 
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Oh and here is my sedum apoleipon (a greek sedum) OPA!! What blooms! @MotherRaphaela (in case you are of Greek ethnicity!) 
Good morning, Greg. And
for the beautiful sedum photo! I'm going to guess, if it is from Greece, that it is not hardy here. I'll look it up, though -- you do seem to send temptation in my direction!
My friend hasn't put a lid on our plant budget yet, but I need to put a lid on what I can get in the ground before winter. At least this year!
Let me see if I can get myself out to photograph our couple of "plain Jane" sedums. They have names, but I'll have to do some digging to remember them. And I see one of our dahlias is blooming again... They go into the ground hopefully each year. The tubers do fine; the flowers are a gamble, although if I remember to start them indoors under lights the short season ones generally do give us some flowers.
No, I'm not Greek. Although we only began in 1977, our monastery is the second oldest women's monastery in what is called now the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). Before the Russian Revolution it was begun by a 1794 missionary outreach of the Russian Church in Alaska. It was given "autocephaly," or canonical independence in 1970 by the Patriarch of Moscow, so if anything, our roots are Russian. Aside from a few old "Russian" parishes that will die before they change though, we are simply American. Since we began, small monasteries like ours have sprung up across the country and a Greek "elder" (part of the Greek Archdiocese that is still very much tied to the Old Country) began a whole string of Greek-speaking, very Greek monasteries a little over ten years ago. (I've spoken with him a few times and realize we live in different worlds...)
Our Metropolitan sent me to France in 1978 to stay with a monastery* founded during WW2 by women who had been nuns in Russia. They had left as their monasteries were closed by the Bolsheviks and met working as part of the French underground resistance to the Nazis, hiding Jewish children in trash cans and smuggling them out of the stadiums where they were on the way to concentration camps, saving as many as they could. Some of the old nuns were still there when I arrived: Amazing women, who survived both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis with a sense of humor intact. My own sense of humor definitely got an added flair from them, and also definitely gave me an aversion to playing games!
My personal ethnicity? A dash of American Indian, then English, Irish and German, in order of antiquity, not percentage. So far, we don't have any "old world" sisters. We are all American, raised mostly Protestant and Catholic before discovering the Orthodox Church, with a hodge-podge of backgrounds, from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Deep South. No west coast sisters, but then they have several monasteries there now to pick from.
Lynn, we'd be honored to have you visit! That link to the pictures you found can be a bit misleading, though -- it includes photos from our web site (www.holymyrrhbearers.com) but also from a number of other monasteries and (mostly) Orthodox sources... Some of us were nuns before our monastery began here in 1977 and as refugees from our previous background, we knew what we didn't want to perpetuate here. So we are traditional in that we still wear habits, for example, and have also gladly embraced the Orthodox tradition of freedom: Orthodox monasteries, for instance, don't have "rules." Definitely another whole new world.
That may be more than you were looking for, but hopefully it satisfies everyone's curiosity !
*If you'd be interested in learning about them, here are some links. This one gives an idea of the spirit we inherited from their first abbess:
http://avowofconversation.word... This is a journal a friend of ours put together while visiting them:
http://www.photomonk.net/Fathe...
