the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to entertain you with all sorts of fascinating things. You may remember me from such posts as “A Trick Of The Light”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Pretty similar to the one from my last post, actually.I wasn’t feeling as serious, though.

The guy I live with said I forgot to show pictures of a couple of grasses that he’s quite taken with; he was at Denver Botanic Gardens with his friend last Saturday and took a couple of pictures.
The first one here, a big grass, is Achnatherum splendens, which now he says he really has to have.
The other one is smaller, about the height of blue grama, which at first he thought it was, but it turned out to be Themeda triandra.
Well, so, anyway, back to today, or really yesterday, first, because I have a picture of a sleeping owl. Lots of crispy, dead silver maples leaves, too.
And a picture of some crocuses, Crocus puringii, which was taken yesterday. With the “big camera”.
Also, this douglas-fir got transplanted, into a pot. It was very unhappy living smack out in the garden, and so now it’s in a pot, and will be shaded in the winter, and hopefully recover. One whole side is brown, and has been for several years. It’s a dwarf douglas-fir that the guy I live with got from Jerry Morris when he visited Jerry’s nursery (gone now). It has a fancy, romantic name: ‘352’.
(That’s another of Jerry’s dwarf conifers, a limber pine, next to it.)Okay, now, today. Mostly cyclamen. If you didn’t know already, the guy I live with is really into cyclamen.
Some live in the upstairs bedroom. (I call it a bedroom though it’s never been one.)
That reddish flower is Cyclamen hederifolium ‘Corfu Red’. There are some cyclamen that flower in the summer, though those don’t do as well here, because summers are so dry. Still, the ones that have been here for years look pretty good now. This is Cyclamen purpurascens ‘Extra Fancy’. It’s true that it’s looked better in past years. There are lots of cyclamen flowering out in the garden right now, which might be hard to believe, considering how horribly dry it’s been. But they seem to be happy. These are almost all Cyclamen cilicium, some of which have self sown.  This is what the leaves look like. Slightly scalloped on the edges. Similar to Cyclamen mirabile, but cilicium has a smooth tuber where mirabile has what they call a “corky” one. The leaves of Cyclamen coum are coming up now, too. Smooth on the edges.

Sometimes the leaves get damaged in cold winters, but new leaves grow in spring. The guy I live with gave some Cyclamen coum to his friend, and these were planted in an area that’s sunny in the winter. The cyclamen start to flower in late January there.  When that happened the first time, he was super jealous, but he does like his friend a lot, and so it was really okay.

There are some crocuses flowering where the cyclamen are, too. These are Crocus kotschyanus ‘Reliant’, which are now seeding around. 

Um, well, here I am going on about cyclamen, and I’ve almost completely forgotten the reason why my post has this title. It was something that happened today.
The guy I live with suddenly got hungry, in the afternoon, and didn’t feel like cooking anything, so he rummaged around in the pantry, and out came this funny, folded bag, which he put into the microwave.
There were a bunch of sounds I didn’t like at all. I had to go out onto the patio and bark.

A minute or so later, the guy I live with took the bag out of the microwave and opened it. I had to go hide in my kitchen fort.
Then all of a sudden, there were these whitish things right in front of me. The guy I live with said to try them, which I did.
They were really good. Salty.
He said this was called microwave popcorn. Newman’s Own. I’d never had anything like this before. He said that Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, and his first cousin Chess, both loved popcorn, and they got to have it every so often.
I understand there’s something called white cheddar popcorn, and I’m pretty sure that’s something to look forward to.

Well that definitely is all for today. New grasses, an owl, crocuses, cyclamen, and microwave popcorn. Not bad at all.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on all the news. You may remember me from such posts as “In The Doghouse”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I know I look pretty serious, and I did get into trouble, which I’ll tell you about in a bit, but that was a few days ago. The guy I live with said that a serious pose might be good once in a while. Well, it snowed last Thursday. We got maybe four inches of snow. I thought it was pretty great. The guy I live with said it didn’t matter to him one way or the other, though the autumn color here is now completely spoiled, as it often is, because it gets so cold “too early” in the year. Lots of trees have brown, crispy leaves hanging on them.

The garden didn’t suffer much and after the snow melted, which it had by Saturday, the crocuses and colchicums started flowering again.

The guy I live with and his friend went out the day before to do some stuff. I had to stay home.
They went to a Mexican restaurant, downtown, that was really tiny. La Pasadita, it was called. The food was pretty good. It was an old house that was built in a triangle where three streets intersected, so the south end was kind of pointy. Then they went to City Floral, a greenhouse that was built in 1911. The guy I live with said he just wanted to make a kind of pilgrimage there because his wife used to like shopping in the gift area, especially before Halloween.
They have a very good selection of garden pots, which you can see there. He completely forgot that he wanted to look at the pots. I guess another trip will be in order.  He did buy a couple of Jellycat stuffed animals, for Christmas presents.

This would have been my entire post, except for the thing that happened.

For almost a year he had been talking about getting a nice blanket for the upstairs bedroom. The blanket that was on the bed was getting pretty ratty, and it was white, “not a very friendly color”, he said. He had been looking at this Pendleton blanket, and finally decided to get one, even though it was really not cheap at all. More of a throw than a blanket, I guess.

So the blanket arrived in the mail last Friday, at about five in the afternoon. He put it on the bed, and we both lay on the bed for a while, until he discovered that I had chewed a hole in the brand-new expensive blanket.

I really don’t know why I did that. I ran to hide in my kitchen fort.
He was at least this angry:
He was upstairs fuming for a while, then all of a sudden he came downstairs, got me out of my fort, and we went upstairs to snuggle on the bed and watch TV. Everything was okay. He doesn’t stay angry for very long. The hole isn’t very big. He knows it’s there, though. And so do I.
We’re both pretty sure there’s a moral to this story, too, but neither of us can figure out quite what it could be. Maybe just one of those things where you know there’s a moral, and don’t know what it is, so you just keep going with on with life.

So I guess that’s all for today. 

Until next time, then.