the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, back from camp, and here today mostly to talk about senescence. You may remember me from such posts as “Cats In A Basket”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that there are a lot of leaves on the ground.
I can show even more.
The early snowdrops, Galanthus bursanus, are having a fine time among the fallen leaves.
But wait, there are even more leaves.
The guy I live with explained to me that the word senescence means “becoming older” or even “declining”, in the biological sense, which is what happens to leaves.
It comes from Latin inchoative verbs which all have the sense of becoming. Inchoative means like gradually forming or becoming. Crescent, from crescens, becoming larger (in the sense of increasing); adolescent, from adolescens, becoming adult, and so on, The -sc- in the word gives it away.
There are a lot of botanical words like this. Flavescens, becoming yellow; canescens, becoming gray; rubescens, becoming red.

Anyway, the guy I live with will eventually get out the Ego battery-operated leaf blower and blow all the leaves into the parts of the garden that benefit from having fallen leaves on them. (Like you wouldn’t see bunches of fallen leaves in a desert or on plains.)
But for now, his activities are restricted because he had heart surgery, a stent installed, which is why I went to camp.
I went once last Monday night, and the guy I live with spent the night on his friend’s couch, with her kitty purring all over him (a horrifying image, I know), and then, later, two nights in the hospital. I didn’t hear anything about cats crawling all over him.
The drugs he got are wearing off but it was something to be around him yesterday. I’m surprised he remembered to wear pants when he went to get the mail.

The most traumatic thing was making arrangements to get to the places he needed to go to, and the places I needed to go to, but everything worked out. He said that stuff like this really isn’t for people who live alone.

Here are some more leaves, still on the shrubs and trees.
The apple tree. This is the only survivor of a bunch of little trees he bought the first year a garden was started here. The late Henry Mitchell kind of mocked people who thought that the best idea was to plant fruit trees in the garden, since you rarely get fruit from them, and in fact the guy I live with has never eaten a single apple from this tree. Squirrels have, but he said they don’t count.
This is the smokebush, Cotinus coggygria. Something the guy I live with would never have planted if he’d been able to get the native C. obovata, especially the form that grows in west Texas.
And the “mystery oak”, a gift from the late Jerry Morris. It’s turning sort of orange.
This is Quercus undulata, a scrub oak in the front yard.
There are some plants in flower. Plants besides snowdrops, I mean.
This is Salvia ‘Raspberry Delight’. The guy I live with has mixed feelings about these “monsoonal plants” that won’t flower unless it rains, but it did rain, last Monday night while I was at camp; we got 0.70 inches of rain.
The Salvia greggii across the path from this decided to flower, too.
And, finally, a little Salvia coccinea. The guy I live with sprinkled seed earlier this year, and was surprised to see anything happen, but obviously something did. The plants could of course be taller, and would be if they were watered every day, but he says this is okay.
And that’s why I haven’t posted in a while.
They say we could get some rain maybe tonight, though the guy I live with doubts that, and that it may snow later this week (he also doubts that) and that it could possibly freeze (he doubts that, too).

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, on this very noisy afternoon. You may remember me from such posts as “A Little Excitement”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s super noisy out in front; they’re repaving our street and there’s a steamroller rolling the new asphalt.
I’ve seen a steamroller before. The guy I live with said that they don’t use steam any more but that people can’t help themselves in calling them steamrollers.
He learned just today that Buffalo Springfield was the name of a steamroller company (using actual steam) in the twentieth century.

Speaking of water vapor, I saw fog for the first time a couple of morning ago.
We don’t have that here a lot.

Also speaking of water, the guy I live with said we’ve had about the normal amount of rain for the last month, and we can certainly tell.
This is Salvia ‘Ultraviolet’ again.
And Salvia greggii:
This is Agastache aurantiaca:
The plants he put in earlier this year were having a rough time, because he had covered the top of the root balls with organic matter, which he said, upon reflection, was an extremely dumb thing to do, for plants which are triggered to flower by rain, as these are.

You know how people are constantly saying to mulch with organic matter to conserve soil moisture, well, the guy I live with said the soil has to be moist in the first place. In a region like ours, where it doesn’t rain all day and all night, but just like for a couple of hours, organic matter impedes infiltration, to sound technical.
Rock is the answer, just like in real life where these plants grow. The rocks let the rain infiltrate down to the soil.
So one thing he did was add more rocks to the little area where the agastaches were growing, to kind of mimic reality.
Because he likes some empty areas, or what I guess they call “negative space”, he spread some rocks in one of the other spaces, too.
He realizes this could be a very unpopular view, but he says “Whatever”.
This area has eremurus in early summer.

Anyway, as I said, the rain has helped a lot of things along.
Here’s new growth on Penstemon pseudospectabilis:
New growth is especially important for plants that overwinter with it, like some penstemons, salvias, and agastaches, even if it gets cold later.
The guy I live with said they’re kind of hinting at the possibility of some snow next week, though it’s not going to freeze. I like snow.

There are crocuses in flower, but I’ve shown those many times before.

And a couple of autumn-flowering snowdrops. This is Galanthus bursanus, which was in flower at the end of August, last year. There are a bunch more just poking out of the pile of leaves. In this case, the leaves are fine (though there might be too many); this species doesn’t seem to need rain to flower, but, instead, cooler soil temperatures. The guy I live with said that the relatively late flowering this year could be due to abnormally high temperatures in September. He doesn’t really know.
And, just up, an autumn-flowering form of Galanthus cilicicus.
The guy I live with said he’s lost interest in collecting snowdrops, with all the markings and names and sometimes weirdly-shaped flowers, but he still likes these, and they do fine in our dry climate.

That’s all I have for today. The steamroller has done its work; the house isn’t shaking any more, and now we have a nice smooth patch of asphalt on our side of the street. (The steamroller will be back next week, for the other side of the street.)
I’ll leave you with a morning picture of me. You can see how green the grass is now.

Until next time, then.