Once again, time has just flown by! It's amazing how quickly that happens, especially around the holiday season. But I've managed to get another update out the door.

I tried to include a little greenery and flowers in these images to counter the cold weather many of you are feeling. Hopefully looking at these pictures will help you get through until spring, which — if the media is correct — comes earlier and earlier each year (see the hort.net top stories section for details). Start making your gardening plans now!

Last time I wrote I mentioned that there were lots of new changes at hort.net. The changes are still happening, mostly behind the scenes. I'm pleased to say that almost every page at hort.net is now XHTML-1.0 compliant, which basically means that it should work in everyone's browser.

I've also added an RSS feed for the hort.net top stories. RSS is a way of syndicating news tidbits so that your RSS reader, browser, or whatever can get news updates of interest to you and present them without you having to go out looking for them.

If you have an RSS reader, add

    http://www.hort.net/topstories/rss

to your list of feeds. Alternatively, you can click on the orange [XML] button in the top stories box when visiting hort.net.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who have contributed to the hort.net fund drive. Since the hort.net infrastructure upgrade is now nearly complete, we need to start thinking about features that should be added to the site. Nobody's given me any feedback yet, so I've just been working on things in an ad hoc manner. Let me know what you'd like to see here!

For those of you who missed the fund drive, it's still going on. There's more information about the fund-raising process and options at

    http://www.hort.net/funds/

Thanks, and I wish all of you a great holiday season!

Christopher Lindsey, gallery maintainer