Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden, and some other stuff, too. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cow-Pen Daisies”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been extremely hot. The sun has been out, which is weird, with the humidity lower than fifteen percent for days now. The guy I live with left me alone (not for very long) every day for a week, I think, though he’s stayed home the last couple of days. He said he was waiting for something to come in the mail.
When he’s been at home he was one the phone so much that he had to change the plan on his cell phone to add more minutes. I wondered why he didn’t talk on the land line instead, but he didn’t.
All of this has to do with him losing his mom, of course.
One thing that he said which I guess I understand, since I haven’t seen my mom in a very long time, was how a lot of links to the past have been broken now; his life in Los Angeles in the 1950s seems like an illusion. There is no one to talk to about that period in his life. I guess this is the way things go.
Here he is, with his mom behind him, maybe about 1954, in Los Angeles. Sort of gardening.
He said this picture of the tree made it look less full than he imagined it. 
This is the front of his grandparents’ house in Los Angeles. The house is gone now, but a lot of the houses in the neighborhood are still there. His grandfather was in the Army and liked to fly this huge flag. 
The back yard.
What really surprised him was how little he wanted from his mom’s house. He did take two watercolors his grandfather did; they’re copies of paintings by other artists which he did in 1933. The guy I live with said he has remembered these two watercolors ever since he was conscious. You can see one of the Fu dogs there, too. He’s had those for a while now.
Since I’m talking about the past, I might as well mention the lamp you can see. That was at his paternal grandmother’s house in east Denver, and when there was an infestation of miller moths a lot of them would get caught in that bowl thing and cook. The guy I live with said the smell was something else. We don’t have that many miller moths here. (It’s funny because his grandmother’s maiden name was Miller and as a kid he thought the moths were named after her, and though he later knew that wasn’t true, it was only in the last few years that he realized they were called “millers” because they look like they’re covered with flour, like a miller would be.)
Now back to gardening. You can see here that we had sun yesterday. This was on my walk.
Today they said “sun”, but this was what we got instead. 
It rained. The guy I live with said not to laugh. 
We had some actual rain about a week ago, maybe half an inch over two days, and now the sternbergias are flowering. The last time they flowered was October of 2000. There must be some relationship between getting rain at just the right time and the flowering. You can also see bindweed; no one has been weeding here lately. The bigger leaves are from Lonicera olgae, from Central Asia. A miniature honeysuckle.
There are cyclamen flowering. This is Cyclamen purpurascens ‘Extra Fancy’, which is almost finished flowering.
Cyclamen cilicium. 
A nice form of Cyclamen hederifolium in the middle of the picture. The point-and-shoot adds too much blue to pinks, and the guy I live with doesn’t know how to fix that. (Except by using the “big camera”.) 
And there are colchicums. The guy I live with said he didn’t know which one this was because a Certain Partly, “who shall be nameless”, stole all the labels when he was a puppy. I don’t remember doing anything like that, but he did look right at me when he said that.
This one is Colchicum cilicicum. He gets “cilicium” and “cilicicum” confused sometimes. Both names refer to ancient Cilicia, an area in southern Turkey. 
He got some new colchicums, from Daffodils and More, last weekend. They were starting to flower, which is okay. When he planted them he didn’t cover over the flowering stalks, like they were in a sort of depression, so that when the stalks wither he can cover them and the corms will be a bit deeper that way. He said you do the same thing with crocosmias, which we don’t grow here, but his friend does, in her garden.
That cage you see is for a little oak, to keep bunnies from nibbling on it.
There are some cow-pen daisies (Verbesina encelioides) in the “way back” too. They needed to be watered a little.
More in the lawn, with Aster oblongifolius. None of these were planted here; they all seeded themselves.
I guess that’s it for today.
Until next time, then.
