The one very successful clematis I have is Josephine. That thing is gorgeous. I have it growing over my gas meter. It comes to life every spring from what looks like a bunch of dead twigs. Two years ago we had our house painted. The clematis was not in the way, but apparently a bird had put a nest in the vine (that's how dense it was) and abandoned it when the painters were there. I was away on vacation and DH noticed a bad smell (the dead baby birds). So he cut down the entire vine and put it in a garbage bag. I was devastated. But she came back in a few weeks, and is now as big as ever. You do need some mulch on the ground. Clematis like cool roots.

It's almost always important that we know the general location of the subject of an identification request. Your insect is most likely the nymph of a leafhopper of some kind.

the leaves are very sticky, had yellow flowers that turned into the green tear shaped pods (if you look close at the picture) and never produced anything.

Dorothy, Thanks for sharing your precious memories too. I bet it was a shock to find yourselves somewhere that you couldn't grow okra! Summertime just isn't summertime without okra growing in the garden. Mary, How blessed we are to be able to look at our gardens and to somehow see in them some long-ago garden that meant so much to us. Jen, Well, all I can think of is that your old house was haunted by a non-gardener. Otherwise, I cannot imagine things not growing for you. Isn't it something how much we're influenced by plants once grown by people we love? We wrap up those precious memories and carry them inside our gardening souls, and when we get a chance, we pull them out and use our memories of those to turn a bare patch of ground, or a front porch with container plants, into a familiar planting area that tugs at our heartstrings. I confess that our home has family influences in the same way. Perhaps because my grandparents' homes were country homes when I was a child, I found myself recreating their country homes when we built our country home here. I had to have a screened porch because I always loved my grandmother's screened porch that she had at their country place when I was a very, very young child. I had to have a white picket fence, a round silver stock tank and a windmill for the same reason, though their windmill actually worked and mine is merely decorative. I had to have a barn, though theirs was a white sheep barn and ours is a red, barn-style garage. I had to have geraniums in our first years here, because she always grew geraniums there. I could go on and on, but it sort of astonishes me how well I remember certain things about that house because I think I was only about 5 or 6 years old when they moved away from the ranch to a little country town. I also didn't deliberately set out to make our country home have similar features to theirs, and yet, it happened. Do you know what I have to remind me of my grandfather's small town house where they lived after they sold the ranch? Grass burs. Common stickers. He was forever walking around the yard, yanking them out of the ground so they couldn't reseed. Now I do the same thing. That's not really a good thing, but it is what it is, and it is a family tradition of sorts that makes me chuckle. When we first moved here, we were so crazy about country living that we just had to sleep with the bedroom windows open so we could listen to all the night sounds. I especially loved to hear the mourning doves cooing early in the day as it reminded me of being at my grandparents' home and hearing the same cooing in the hours before sunrise. I even liked hearing the faraway sound of a train coming down the train tracks just like I would hear at night at their place. After the frogs started having regular conventions and croaking so loudly all night long that we couldn't sleep for all the racket, we gave up sleeping with the windows open. I still get to hear the mourning doves cooing early in the day when I first go outdoors. Strolls down memory lane are so much fun! Dawn