BUG: matplotlib inset-axis #10407
This is the issue: https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/10407 
I just added a bunch of try-catch AttributeError around the offending code - it seemed to do the trick for me.

this would need a test
 Thanks, this is also a side effect of #9740. 

However, example in #10407 looks work on current master and matplotlib 1.4.3, maybe fixed by #10879. Can you show another example which causes a problem? Of course it is very nice to add an explicit tests for this.
 @d1manson can you update according to comments
 @d1manson pls update
 Here is some information from pd.show_versions()
python: 3.4.0.final.0
pandas: 0.17.0
matplotlib: 1.4.3

I want to use add_axes instead of subplots.  The problem with subplots is that all subplot are the same height.  The advantage of add_axes is that subplots can be created easily with different heights.  For my use case I need  the first subplot to be smaller in height than subsequent subplots.

Here is a simple test case to reproduce the problem on in pandas 17.0:
df_test = pd.DataFrame([1,2,3,4]) # create DataFrame
fig_test = plt.figure() # create the figure instance

#add_axes : Add an axes at position rect [left, bottom, width, height]
#where all quantities are in fractions of figure width and height.
axes_a =  fig_test.add_axes([0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.4]) 
df_test.plot(ax = axes_a, title = 'Lower')
axes_b =  fig_test.add_axes([0.1, 0.6, 0.8, 0.2]) 
df_test.plot(ax = axes_b, title = 'Higher')

This causes error AttributeError: 'Axes' object has no attribute 'rowNum'

I really need this functionality - looks like I need to downgrade pandas.
 I think this one is trying to solve the same underlying issue as what I tried to solve with https://github.com/pydata/pandas/pull/11561, which is now merged.

@patclaffey normally your example should work in the master version of pandas now.
 @d1manson the approach I took in my fix was to just not call this function (`_handle_shared_axes`) when not having a SubplotAxes, instead of catching the AttributeError. Sorry I didn't see this before, but thanks for working on it!
