Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on news from the garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Day Of The Scorpiris”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristically sun-drenched pose.
They say we may get some rain this weekend, which will be nice because April has been so dry.
It snowed again a few days ago, which is why I didn’t post then. It didn’t freeze the night it snowed, and the snow was all gone by the end of the next day.
There are plants in flower, which may not come as much of a surprise.
This is a groundcover-type manzanita. It’s been in the front yard for many years and has never been watered.
The guy I live with says it may be heavy-handed of me to show a picture of the apple tree next, since “manzanita” is Spanish for “little apple” (referring to the fruit), but this is a regular apple tree and no relation to species in the genus Arctostaphylos, which are related to rhododendrons, blueberries, heathers, and plants like that.
Anyway, the apple tree.
The apple tree was the first thing planted here. There was a row of them in the back yard; they all died but this one. The guy I live with said he should have taken that as a sign.
The juno irises are flowering, though not as spectacularly as in some years, because it’s been so dry. Junos are in the Subgenus Scorpiris, and some botanists place them in their own genus, Juno.
There are a lot of species and the guy I live with said he wants them all, except for one which isn’t hardy because it grows on, like, Sicily or some place like that.
They’re mostly not at all easy to acquire.
We worked in the garden today, even though there was an annoying, nasty chemical smell from next door. The guy I live with got a sore throat.
But the most annoying thing, and I could tell that this was super annoying by the language used, was the amount of effort digging out roots of this plant he bought at a plant sale some years ago.
The roots are thick as a pencil and they go down deep into the ground. The plant spread everywhere and the guy I live with gets mad just looking at the new shoots.
The guy I live with said this has happened before, and more than once; planting something that immediately displayed a tendency to take over the whole garden.
He dug and dug and dug, and got at least a few of the roots. He said this thing is even worse than smooth brome, which is saying something, believe me.
You can see some junos in the background there.
The cages are for crocuses, so that bunnies won’t mow down the leaves.
This will all have to be redone, with a new gravel mulch.
So that’s our news for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me lying on the couch, listening to a lecture about me “beflortling” the couch. He says the word “beflortle” means to totally rearrange something that was all arranged before, but I think it’s a made-up word.
Until next time, then.