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 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.

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 my struggles to keep up with all the changes here. You may remember me from such posts as “A Chance Of Effelants”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that some work is being done here.
The cowpen daisies were wilted on this very dry day, but they’re okay. The buffalo grass in the path is brown again, though. I’m lying on some, in this picture.

What used to be a border of “traditional” plants, before I came here, was transformed into a border of dryland plants.
I hear that a lot of penstemons are going to be seeded in here. There are some Penstemon eatonii already in this garden. And a lot of cactus.
There was almost nothing in this part of the garden earlier this year.

You can see how dry the buffalo grass is here, too.
If we got a lot of rain, the grass would turn green in a couple of days. The guy I live with said he certainly isn’t going to water the grass. We kind of aren’t allowed to, anyway.

On the last day of August, this happened.
I think it’s rained a little every day since then. Not enough rain to make the buffalo grass green or un-wilt the cowpen daisies, but enough. (The daisies look fine in the morning and in the evening, and the buffalo grass in my Private Lawn looks fine.)

And there are some plants in flower. The guy I live with took this picture as we were going up the front walk. This is Mirabilis multiflora. The phone got the color wrong; it should be darker.
Lots of sphaeralceas are in flower.
What’s really funny is that the cyclamen are in flower. The guy I live with hasn’t watered the garden since early March, and wondered about the cyclamen, but here they are.
These are Cyclamen hederifolium, flowering with the ivy, Hedera helix, which the guy I live with says is a pretty heavy-handed “combination”; the ivy refuses to go away, even though he keeps pulling it.
The cyclamen are going to stay, but a lot of the “fancy” bulbs are going to Denver Botanic Gardens, because the guy I live with is “officially” bored with plants that need watering in order to flower, like the autumn-flowering crocuses.
The crocuses need to have their overwintering leaves protected from rabbits, of which we have a few, since I decided to retire from rabbit pursuit.
You can see one here, napping under the sagebrush.
Plants dug up and given away, new plants going in various places; it’s been very difficult to keep up with all of this.
And then last week the unexpected happened.
The guy I live with had been talking about going to Boulder for a while. His friend was busy, so he drove there alone.
He was very anxious about doing that (I could tell); he said that when his wife was here, they would just go. There are so, so many things he doesn’t do any more, and driving for over an hour was one of them.
But he went.
This is Harlequin’s Gardens. The guy I live with bought a lot of plants. All native dryland plants, because, as he told me, he wonders if things will ever be the same again, considering what passed for winter this last time, and considering how little rain we’ve gotten (a little over six inches in the last 120 days).

Planting often required removal of existing plants; I lay near the guy I live with while he removed dozens of seedlings of Melica ciliata, a pretty grass that seeds all over the place, so now he dislikes it. He used a lot of colorful language while scraping out the grass with his nejiri weeder.
Sometimes it’s good to turn around to see what’s going on.
The guy I live with said that eventually I’ll see that there’s been a pattern to all this activity. “All will be revealed”, he said.
I can hardly wait.

Until next time, then.