Today is Wednesday, so it’s watering day in our garden. The weather started out nice and sunny, but now it’s thundering, and here I am not enjoying it at all.
Thunder is scary. At this time of year, it gets all thundery in the afternoon, and it can go on like this every day for months on end. I don’t like it. It isn’t raining, either, just thundering. The guy I live with had to water a bunch of new plants, which of course is his fault since he bought them. I like to help pulling the hose around the garden, which he thinks is funny sometimes, unless I start pulling it the wrong way. I think that’s funny, but for some reason he doesn’t.
The guy I live with used a watering wand with a cut-off device, which is the approved method, though sometimes he uses a watering can, which no one ever talks about. The stuff he’s watering isn’t technically Approved Vegetation, annuals or vegetables, but he wrote to the water board to see if hand watering Unapproved Vegetation was okay, too. Of course Watering Day means watering lawns, but we don’t do that. I see the irony, but most humans don’t.
The guy I live with bought another Purshia tridentata, which is Unapproved Vegetation and is going to undergo Unapproved Planting, but he does this anyway. Here’s the purshia.
The guy I live with said to post this, because it was mentioned on Panayoti’s blog and he thought it was funny that they grow this is Germany but hardly anyone grows it here, even though he’s had one in the front garden for 25 years and it’s never, ever been watered. And that’s what’s going to happen to the new one, too.
He says it’s a good replacement for forsythia, which he doesn’t grow, but forsythia is Approved Vegetation and the purshia, or bitterbrush as it’s sometimes called, is not. It doesn’t get as big, which may be the reason.
Here’s a penstemon, too. The guy I live with’s mind is going, and so he can’t remember which species this is, though he knows it’s in Section Coerulei, which is one of his favorite sections. I’m supposed to say that that’s Allium anisopetalum behind it and hanging over it. (And not grass he should have pulled out, I guess he means.)
The real reason I had to do this post, because it’s embarrassing to see me frightened of thunder, is an iris. He could have done this post, just talking about the iris, but he says it would have seemed too boastful or something. This is Iris iberica subsp. elegantissima, the form from Irgirdir in eastern Turkey. He got it from Rare Plants in the U.K.
And speaking of Panayoti (I’m a dog, so my mind wanders), my mommy took a whole bunch of pictures of his garden the day before she died. The guy I live with finally screwed up the courage to look at her camera, and it turned out that the memory card was damaged, and so the pictures are gone. It was a big disappointment, and I know some people were hoping to see these eventually, but life is full of disappointments.
She took over 250 pictures of his garden. She loved taking pictures, and the guy I live with was going to post her pictures on the fourth anniversary of her death, which is coming up soon. Oh well.
the miserable gardener 
I love that picture of Cindy in the mirror. Thanks for sharing it here. Cindy….Great missingness of her this moment.
Thank god for spellcheck, I typed mirrow. That’s what happens after “open every day in May” and a glass of wine to cap the 15th day of that open every.. I want that iris. Iris iberica subsp. elegantissima — Wow. I really like almost all kinds of iris, even the bearded, which I know you don’t really like. Btw, spell-checker does not approve of the word spellcheck. or “missingness, or even Btw. Spellcheck is, like, so yesterday.
Yeah. These are bearded irises, but in a different section, Oncocyclus. There are two reasons why regular bearded irises aren’t common in the garden here. First is the chance of spreading viruses, to which oncocyclus iris are quite susceptible (they aren’t cheap, and I’d rather not have to resort to chemicals), and the second is that this is essentially a wildflower garden, and hybrids that depart from the natural shape of the flower don’t fit in.
There’s a price for being a snob.
My spell-checker was created by someone who thinks words should be hyphenated that are now considered to be not hyphenatable.
The iris photo is like a picture of the universe…a black hole with energy swirling in. O brave new world that has such flowers in it!
They are indeed cool.
Yep, that iris is amazing! I don’t understand this whole concept of approved an not approved vegetation!? Who decides and why?
I’m sorry that we won’t be seeing Cindy’s photos of Panayoti’s garden, that would have been nice. I am happy you shared that photo of her above, it’s wonderful.
The business of approved vegetation is a joke. Sort of. Denver is on watering restrictions, yet daily hand watering of annuals and vegetables is allowed. The water board says that vegetables require as much water as a lawn, but lawn watering is restricted.
It would take quite a bit of explanation, but in a nutshell, it’s so weird, it’s weird.
Bob … please don’t automatically assume that those images aren’t recoverable … they may be hiding there in ghost form … please don’t give up until you’ve tried some ‘recovery’ software that will extract even deleted data from the memory card. It may be that the images weren’t captured at all but this would seem unlikely as Cindy knew how many she had taken! Hope you can recover some at least! Kind regards, Cliff
I thought about that. The card is so scratched that neither computer recognizes a card in the H drive (or whichever drive). It’s an old card, for an old camera (takes four AA batteries). Relatively old, that is.
Maybe next year I’ll look at it some more.