Lots on flowers in yesterday's Chron. Floral wallpaper, flower vases, and how to grow rhododendrons.
Also, more on the Designer's Showcase in Presidio Heights in the form of a look into the stagecraft that went into the creation of a single room (#21). Seems that much of the work lies in sourcing materials -- in time. (There's no luxurious trolling on eBay for just the right console table, as there is when you're slowly, lovingly furnishing your own home.) The other half of the work, it would seem, is inventing a person to inhabit your room. Very creative.
On Rhodies, the best advice in that piece was to grow them in raised beds -- either boxed in a frame or just on a berm. Even though they like moisture, they do not like to sit in soggy soil. If you have alkaline, poorly-draining soil around them, and have just worked acidic soil into the hole where the Rhododendron will grow, the alkaline soil will still influence the balance of the acidic soil via water runoff. You can also end up with a bowl of non-draining hardpan (eventually) around the bottom of your plant. To tell you just how picky about acidity these guys can be, I'll tell you how I nearly killed mine. I had one growing on a berm under a tree next to my deck. I have naturally acidic soil, and I apply acidic mulch to the plant once a year. A couple years ago, I noticed that the plant stopped thriving over the course of several months. It had discolored leaves, was dropping leaves, and the flowers were small and ill-looking. I figured out that it was suffering from the aquarium water I was dumping off of the deck -- near but not directly on the Rhodie soil. I'd been adding about a teaspoon of aquarium salts per five gallons to my aquarium, and was doing five-gallon water changes about once a month. That was enough to harm a mature plant. After a light pruning and treatment with acidic mulch and diluted acidic fertilizer, my Rhodie came back just fine. I stopped dumping the water there.