the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on what’s been happening in our gardening. You may remember me from such posts as “Below Seasonal Normals”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Once again, it may look dry here, because of the brown warm-season grasses, but it’s really not. The soil is very damp.
People keep saying how dry it is, but the average precipitation for January here is about 0.43 inches (11mm), which is pretty dry, regardless.
We got more snow about ten days ago, very dense snow, and so we received almost half again the average precipitation for January.
What’s weird is all the warm weather. We often get stretches of warm weather in winter, but not nearly as many days as we’ve had since the first of November.
It was 61F (16C) here today.
Just a few years ago we were “below seasonal normals” for weeks on end; this lasted for about four or five winters and was very tiresome, as I know from having to hear about it constantly.

I know it’s been a while since I posted but not much has been happening. The guy I live with has been painting.

It’s been so warm that some of the colchicums are sending up leaves. This is certainly not normal but the leaves went through the last snow and lows around 3F (-16.1C) with no problem.
The guy I live with said maybe this is normal in places with very mild winters.
It is normal, though weird, to see roses and clematis start leafing out at this time of year, but the guy I live with said he’s seen this many, many times, and nothing bad happens.

He’s seen Cyclamen coum in flower this early before, but usually it was only one or two flowers.
And there was a crocus in flower. This is Crocus korolkowii. Not a very good picture.
Most of the activity here has involved snowdrops. Of course.
There were more coming up in the shade garden path and these were dug up and potted today.
I helped, in my usual fashion.
The guy I live with said he got a nice picture of ‘Nothing Special’ in the shade garden.
This needs to be moved to a sunnier spot in the winter. Snowdrops like shade in summer and sun in winter.
And, while in the front yard, he made a movie.
There were a lot of bees.

And, finally, some seeds came in the mail.
These are mostly annuals because the guy I live with decided to stop growing a lot of plants from seeds, as I said in a previous post.
The lily is easy to grow from seed but will take a long time to grow to flowering size.
The guy I live with said it might be nice to try to grow a bunch of sunflowers out by the back fence. His wife’s favorite was ‘Italian White’ but Hudson didn’t offer that.

This is kind of a sad time of year for the guy I live with. Most times are, but the feeling that spring will be here eventually can be a hard thing. He used to get the Hudson catalog, give it to his wife to check things she wanted, and then he would look at it, and order their seeds. He’s been ordering from Hudson for over thirty-five years, every year.

They say we may get some rain later this week. Rain in February here is “just plain weird”, but since a cold wave isn’t expected–yet–the guy I live with said rain would be just fine.
I guess we’ll see.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about the viburnum and some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “The Long Lead”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Once again, it may look very dry here but the soil is quite damp just an inch below the surface. We got about four or five inches of snow ten days ago.
However.
I put that word in a sentence by itself because even that much snow seems to have no effect on the guy I live with’s peace of mind.
He suffers from considerable anxiety, and is seeing someone about it, and even with all that snow, there was the wind.
It melted all the snow, as you can see.
Last Thursday he went out to lunch with his friend, and when he came back he saw there was a “fire weather” warning. It turned out that this was for places to the north of us, but that didn’t make him feel calm.
And then the next day, when he had an appointment, there was another warning, and our house was right in “the pink zone” So he canceled the appointment to stay home with me.
I do appreciate this, by the way.
It turned out we got almost no wind.

He explained that anxiety is irrational, and no amount of rational thinking, which he does from time to time, can help that. He looked at a map of fire stuff and we’re in a “low risk” zone but that didn’t help. There is of course the thing that happened before I came here that he still has to live with, and I can tell that’s been affecting him in the last year or so, more than usual.

I guess I understand all that because when I find something scary and have to hide in my upstairs fort the guy I live with often comes up and talks to me softly about how things are really okay, but it doesn’t seem to help much.
There was a time when the wind was blowing so hard a few years ago I was terrified, and didn’t want to go outside. We did go out, but the guy I live with clipped a leash onto my collar so I wouldn’t blow away.

And then yesterday there was yet another warning, but we didn’t get much wind.
The snowdrops didn’t care at all.
This is Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’, which is fine with freezing weather, since it doesn’t freeze when everything else does. He got this at a local garden center.
Two of the snowdrops that were dug up to avoid having them wiped out by the new gas line, which will be installed eventually, are under the “instant greenhouse” for better protection. The greenhouse cover has sort of been reinforced.
This is ‘John Gray’; you can see someone has nibbled on one of the petals.
And this is ‘Byfield Special’.
Both of these have been in the garden for some years but have never done much because they weren’t getting enough sun. They’re not completely open, of course, but I wanted to show how well they’re doing, despite being dug up in their growing season.

Graham Stuart Thomas, writing in Three Gardens, says this: “If they flowered at midsummer we should not accord much enthusiasm to snowdrops, but in the earliest months they are specially welcome, and a study of their leaf colours from grey to shining rich green, the vernation, and the flower variations provide a lot of interest.”

This is obviously true for the guy I live with.
Because our winters generally aren’t snowbound, he sometimes criticizes himself for trying to transplant the forms of Helleborus niger that flowered at this time of year (they all died), not planting winter-flowering heaths, and so on, but he most certainly does not criticize himself for planting Viburnum farreri years ago, named after Reginald Farrer, a favorite writer and “the father of modern rock gardening”.
It’s having a very good winter indeed, and, yes, this is the time for it to flower, if the winter isn’t too cold. The guy I live with says it’s hard to photograph.
You can see the bees flying around it even before you get close to it.  And you can smell it, too. It’s scented like heliotrope.

A week ago, when he wasn’t sure how cold it would get, he cut some flowering branches, got instructions on how to cut them for a vase, with water, because he has no experience with that, and here they are downstairs.
Also not a great picture. You can smell the flowers when you walk into the room.

After all of this, I’ll leave with you with a picture of me watching the guy I live with today, as he cut more twigs for the house, hoping for some snow tonight. (Rain would be nicer, but we sometimes try to be realistic.)

Until next time, then.