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 today to talk about heroic efforts. You may remember me from such posts as “Crickets And Coyotes”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was pretty hot today. The guy I live with said that “they” claimed it was the last hot day of the year, and he said they should quit predicting stuff like that.

I seem to have to reiterate my position that, as a purebred border collie, I don’t like weird things happening, but they seem to keep happening, as though my position on this means nothing to the cosmos. (The guy I live with was about to explain this to me but I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.)
Yesterday a young guy came to the front door, to locate the phone line in the back yard, because the buried electrical line that went out some months ago is going to be replaced.
When he was done, he told the guy I live with that there was a goose in our yard.
There was. I only looked at it once. We felt bad for the goose. The guy I live with checked on the internet to see what to do, but the division of wildlife was closed over the weekend, so maybe they’ll come out tomorrow, because if the goose was sick, they need to know.
It had to be moved, so the guy I live with did that. And moved to a place where nothing else might find it interesting.

Because, on our morning walk today, we saw a very large brown pile. I only looked at that, too. The guy I live with used the “b word” but I stopped listening. I could tell who did that by all the unusual scents I noticed before we got to the pile.
Later in the day, the guy I live with went out to the path and moved the pile with the shovel he’s used for gardening since he was pretty little, so no one, meaning the guy I live with, would accidentally step in it. That was a really heroic thing to do. At least he said it was.
This is the shovel: a Tool, Entrenching, Model 1945, which saw action in Korea.
The shovel was issued to his father, so it’s even older than the guy I live with. Like an antique. It’s now frozen in place; the collar or whatever that you turn no longer turns. You can see how much use it’s had.
The little metal wire is what he uses to “feather” roots with.

Some work was done in the garden today. Maybe this picture shows how hot it was. It looks hot to me.
There’s a little rabbitbrush in flower. The purple-leafed Prunus andersonii has done very well without any watering all this hot, hot summer, and the guy I live with heard that it might be introduced into cultivation. Cuttings from this little tree were taken a couple of years ago. It does much better, drought-wise, than one of its putative parents, Prunus × cistena.
Some asters are in flower. This is Symphyotrichum oblongifolium; very similar to Claude Barr’s ‘Dream of Beauty’.
The guy I live with removed a bunch of these asters because they do seed around like crazy, but there will be more next year. Most of them have purple flowers.

Oh, I mentioned work. While I lay on the patio, supervising, the guy I live with worked in the ninety degree heat, slathered with sunblock, to widen the path on the north side of the garden, because plants were moving into it and they got stepped on every time either of us walked down the path.
He dug up plants, planted other plants, scraped up gravel from behind the sand pile, strewed the gravel on the path where some was missing, raked it, and this is the “heroic” result.
It’s true, as the guy I live with conceded, that that green fence is unsightly beyond belief, but I’m a purebred border collie with a “high prey drive”, though maybe less so as I get older, and the fence is to protect the plants in case I get tempted to go in there to chase the squirrels that need to be chased.
The Havahart trap is just there, to pretend that the guy I live with has some control over the rabbits, when in fact he has none.
The red is a phone-cable locating flag.

Back to the fence for a minute, he said he would much rather have this, a single loop (or is it a double?) woven wire fence. This one is very old.
You can still get fencing like this, he said, but apparently not in the height he would want (about two feet), and it’s extremely expensive.
There may be some in an antique shop somewhere in town, but that would involve a lot of looking. There used to be a place not too far away, in Morrison, where the guy I live with and his wife would go a lot, but it’s gone now.

That’s all I have for today. It rained again, for a little while, but not enough maybe to even measure, like it has every day for at least a week.
The guy I live with started one of those “cosmos” lectures but once again I quickly lost interest. There are things to smell.

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 give you just the bear facts, as well as talk about our garden, some. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cow-Pen Daisies”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Well right off, I’ve been listening to the guy I live with explain to me that he thinks his garden should exemplify a state of calm. He prefers not to have a lot of plants in flower during the summer, because he says having that’s a holdover from climates that have a lot of summer rain, and he prefers a drier look, which he thinks is calmer. He said this would be a very unpopular view if he advocated it, which he doesn’t. It’s just for him.
Grasses waving in the breeze can help assuage depression and anxiety, which the guy I live with has a lot of both.

One non-calm event has been slowly taking place here. The cutting down (but not removal) of two lilacs.
These lilacs came from The Green Spot nursery in Littleton, which the guy I live with thinks was originally the late George Kelly’s nursery when his Cottonwood Garden Shop was wiped out in the flood of June 1965. He could have his facts wrong. George Kelly was a pioneer when it came to growing native plants, but of course nurseries have to sell lilacs, too, to make customers happy.
The guy I live with and his wife visited that nursery just once.
You can see how bad the lilacs looked after this summer. Maybe they’re in a place where rain doesn’t reach at all. (The green is the New Mexican privet, which doesn’t care.)

The other non-calm thing has to do with Mahonia (now Alloberberis) fremontii.
It was covered in fruit a couple of weeks ago.
Now it looks like this.
I’ve noticed some highly unusual scents on the mahonia.
The guy I live with said that his neighbor across the street said she saw “the bear” in someone’s driveway a couple of days ago, so that explains it.
I don’t want to see the bear. I’ve seen a bear, and one was enough for me.

Now for some calmer things. The guy I live with took this picture and said “Safer with me than any creature on earth.”
He said that was from “Big Trouble in Little China”, a movie I’ve never seen.
As you can see, the bunny is very, very safe.
The bunnies live here; I don’t chase them. They do nibble on newly-planted plants, maybe to try them out, which is why you see cages in some pictures.

Now for a series of pictures which the guy I live with thinks illustrates the idea of calm in the garden. The white river rocks have been moved so the guy I live with can crawl under the privets to collect pea gravel. The fence will be removed, eventually, when plants adapted to sand are growing there, instead of fancy bulbs.

There’s an incipit (I’ve always wanted to use that word) of a path here. The path will be dirt. You can see the big metal chicken. 
A peep into the Employees Only section of the garden.
The red thing is a tomato, dropped by a squirrel.
The trough patio, with the ants.Eriogonum corymbosum.
Where the cyclamen live.
That brings me to the end of today’s post. I will definitely let everyone know if I have the misfortune to see a bear again.
I prefer calmer things, thank you very much.

Until next time, then.