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 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.

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 describe more work done in our garden.  You may remember me from such posts as “The Project”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
So today I’m going to talk about yet more work done in the garden. The guy I live with has been working like crazy, just like he did when he painted the inside of the house earlier this year.
When he gets this sort of bee in his bonnet it’s almost all he can think of, but I know he enjoys doing this work, some of which he’s planned to do for a few years.

The rock wall in the sandpile is almost finished. As I said earlier, it’s hard to see. But it’s there. (That one grayish rock isn’t part of the wall.)
Rabbits got in here and messed around with the sand and gravel near the cactus at lower left, which is why they look disheveled.
This bed was originally for special bulbs, but the top of the bed got too dry, and everything died. He planted some young agaves here.

I’m surprised that the bed hasn’t been ripped apart, because the guy I live with now has very strong opinions about garden design, and especially about the way our garden should look.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago the guy I live with purchased a single Salvia greggii and jammed it into the garden just to make the hummingbirds happy.
Then it rained, and as I showed in my last post, all the salvias burst into flower, so this one salvia in the middle of the garden looked kind of dumb.
Yesterday, the guy I live with noticed the plant had wilted, and one more day of that would have been the end of it. The rain didn’t help it at all.
He dug it up; this is what the root ball looked like.
Bone dry. The guy I live with has repeatedly shown what he does what gross peat-mossy root balls like this, how quickly peat moss dries out in our garden, and he said it served him right for just planting this salvia.
He soaked the root ball in water, “feathered” the roots by pulling them apart with a little steel tool, and within an hour it looked like this:
It was planted in the enclosure.

If he had purchased this two months earlier, it would have been given the “super genius” treatment, to allow the roots to leave the root ball, but at this time of year it’s more practical to “feather” the roots and get the plant into the ground, with these salvias.

He also got seven Salvia greggii ‘Wild Thing’ at a local nursery.
He soaked the roots,”feathered” them as much as possible, walked the thirty-nine steps from the patio to the enclosure, and planted them there.
Maybe you can’t see them.
They’re in these cages. The salvias have “irritatingly” brittle branches so these changes are to prevent the guy I live with from tripping over them and breaking the branches.
I know this doesn’t look like much.

Speaking of branches, the person at the nursery said there was one they wouldn’t get if they bought these plants, but the guy I live with pointed to the base of the plant.
Those leaves at the base of the plant are very important for plants adapted to monsoonal rainfall which might not be hardy here; the basal leaves overwinter and generally ensure that plants like this will make it through the winter.

The salvias will need to be watered a lot, before it gets cold (if it does). Then they can be left on their own. They flower in spring, but then don’t flower again unless it rains, which is okay with the guy I live with, though of course an extravagant display at this time of year is excellent, and the hummingbirds would agree.
It did rain here today, a little. The guy I live with wanted more.
And that’s it for today.

Until next time, then.