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 bring you up to date on all sorts of things. You may remember me from such posts as “Fencing Lessons”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Most of the green you see in this picture is “undesirable green”: the “horribly weedy” Melica ciliata and Allium caeruleum. The guy I live with has a lot of digging up to do.

It was a pretty nice day today, though far too dry for spring. Yesterday a really chilly wind blew through the garden and it was yet another “fire weather” day, despite the fact that we got a tenth of an inch of rain a few days before that.
This does not help the guy I live with’s anxiety one little bit. It all seems so wrong.
He went to the doctor to talk about the anxiety last week, but the title of today’s post isn’t all about him. (The guy I live with said nothing is all about him.)

Not even mentioning the news, it’s been extremely dry here since the beginning of the water year, which starts on the first of October, with very high temperatures, endless wind, and endless “fire weather” warnings.

The guy I live with said that the state of “the snowpack” is something to think about. There’s this thing called SNOTEL. The Snowpack Telemetry Network. These are stations all throughout the western United States which monitor snow level and water equivalents.
Abnormally high temperatures caused a lot of the snowpack, already at low levels, to melt in the last few weeks.
To give some examples, the Glen Cove monitor at 11.410 feet, west of Colorado Springs, measured zero percent of the median snowpack yesterday.
The Echo Lake monitor, near Mount Blue Sky, at 10,660 feet, measured 1 percent of the median.
The Buckskin Joe monitor, at 11, 160 feet, south of Breckenridge, measured 22 percent.
The Lone Cone monitor, at 9,730 Feet, south of Norwood, measured 9 percent.
There are some monitors which measure a higher percent.
(This information comes from interactive maps on the US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service website.)

The guy I live with said it isn’t easy to say what this may mean for the summer, but he said he’s wary of buying too many plants this year, because we’re already on watering restrictions.

Okay, so that’s that. Now let’s talk about some other things.
I went for my annual physical and my doctor said I was fine. The guy I live with was of course pleased with that.

There are plants in flower here.
Here is Mertensia lanceolata, a harbinger of spring all along the foothills of the Rockies and elsewhere. They’re not having the greatest year, what with the lack of snow and rain.
The redbud is in flower. This came as a “passenger” in the rootball of a pine the guy I live with was given. He dug up the pine, which was unhappily lying flat on the ground, and left the redbud. He said the pine had some chance of surviving.
This is Iris magnifica Agalik. The Agalik part must refer to a place where it was originally found.
Here are a couple of fritillarias. The guy I live with, who has a perfect memory, is unsure of the names of these, which he says is a sign that his mind is going.
This is Fritillaria olivieri.
It often pays to look inside the flowers.

In other news, we had a visitor last night. The guy I live with said he was sure someone was walking on the garage roof the night before, and last night I was absolutely certain there was someone, because there was.
We haven’t seen raccoons here in several years. The guy I live with posted this picture on Facebook and people said a lot of negative things about raccoons, but they don’t bother us much. Well, they don’t bother the guy I live with, but they certainly bother me. Imagine having a masked intruder on top of your house. I didn’t even have to imagine it.

That almost winds things up for today, but I also wanted to mention that the ducks have returned to the canal.
That rope had a piece of wood attached to the bottom of it, and is used as a swing. Not by the guy I live with, who would probably break the whole tree, and himself, if he tried to swing on it, but used by kids.
There’s also a crawdad (or crayfish or crawfish) trap in the creek below it. The guy I live with says some people eat them, and the water in the canal is pretty clean, since it comes from the mountains.
There may or may not be less water in the canal this summer. I went in the canal a wek or so ago. The water was cold.

Well, that’s all I have for today. I’ll leave with you a picture of me posing by the wild plums (Prunus americana) flowering along the canal road. The guy I live with says the plums make excellent jam. The flowers are fragrant.
Coyotes like to eat them plums and I find that very interesting indeed. I can tell when they’ve been by the plums.

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 fritillarias. You may remember me from such posts as “At A Distance”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
There’s the purple-lived hybrid peach or whatever, and you can see how the native warm-season grasses don’t contribute a very spring-like look, but they will, later.
The guy I live with is reading a lot of discouraging things about water restrictions and the frightfully low snowpack, but those things usually don’t affect this garden much. There are only a couple of places in the garden that need anything like regular watering.

So anyway it’s my job today to talk about fritillarias. Someone has to do it.
You can see that the “header” was changed. It’s Fritillaria pallidiflora, a Chinese species used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Obviously it’s easy to grow.

The name fritillaria comes from the Latin fritillus, for dice box, and no doubt the box was checkered in some way or the dice made it look like that. The guy I live with said more research is necessary on his part. The fritillary butterfly is named for that checkering, too.
Not all fritillarias are checkered.
One of the most famous is Fritillaria imperialis. Here are some flowering under the hedge of New Mexican privets, Forestiera pubescens.
They have a smell. I’ve talked about this before. Some people say skunk, some people say half like a fox, half like garlic.
The guy I live with said that’s not exactly what they smell like, and I immediately understood, because I notice that smell, sometimes, on my evening walks. I have an excellent sense of smell. The guy I live with said he was certain other people weren’t growing Fritillaria imperialis.
The big stinky bulbs don’t need to be planted on their sides, like some people say.

There is a non-stinky species, which is now very hard if not impossible to find, since the bulb company the guy I live with bought them from is no longer in business.
This is Fritillaria eduardii.
This is the white form of Fritillaria meleagris. The purple form, more often seen, is checkered, and meleagris means “checkered like a guinea fowl” in ancient Greek. There were some of the purple ones in the shade garden but they probably got wiped out when the new gas line was put in.
This is Fritillaria latakiensis. It’s very similar to Fritillaria elwesii, but not quite like it.
This is elwesii.
Here’s Fritillaria thunbergii, just starting to flower.
The guy I live with doesn’t know what this is, since the label has disappeared. There’s a place online to look this up, called Fritillaria Icones.
This is one starting to flower, too, and he’s not sure what this is.
It looks kind of grabby to me.

This is Fritillaria crassifolia, a really little fritillaria. The flower is the size of a grape.
The guy I live with forgets the name of the larger one next to it.

And finally, a very different one, sometimes put in a separate genus, Korolkowia.
This is Fritillaria sewerzowii. (The guy I live with says that if an English-speaking botanist has transliterated the Russian name it might be spelled severtsoffii.)
This was flowering happily when it was about 90 degrees F last week.
This is one called ‘Ornament’.These have finally produced some seeds which the guy I live with just buries in the soil, and some seedlings have appeared. It may have been too hot for seeds to have formed this year.

Well, that’s all I have for today. Kind of a lot, really.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, showing how green the grass is now. That path will never have grass on it because so many people and dogs walk on it.
The guy I live with does wish the county would come by and mow all that dry grass and pick it up. Compost is very important, though we don’t use it in the way other people do, and maybe I’ll talk about that some time.

Until next time, then.