Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to amaze and delight you. You may remember me from such posts as “The Worst Laid Plans” and “The Sun, Finally”, among so many others.
I am feeling quite fine, incidentally, and thank you, though of course the guy I live with frets a lot about me. He doesn’t have much of anything else to think about, which may sound like all he thinks about is me (an excellent subject for pondering, if you ask me), but in truth, his mind is completely blank most of the time. Here I am in a characteristic pose, expecting a biscuit.
I got one, of course.
For some reason we decided to get up before the sun came up, even though the guy I live with said we could sleep until nine o’clock, which didn’t sound very productive to me. Then he looked outside and said something about the redbud glowing eerily in the predawn light and so took a picture of it.
Maybe it is eerie.
Well, of course, naturally, he then decided to take more pictures. The red is the Wasatch maple, Acer grandidentatum. He likes that name better than bigtooth maple which he says conjures up peculiar images. The maple does grow south into Arizona and Mexico and stuff so Wasatch is really a misnomer, but he says it’s a cool name, and we like to stick with cool.
That’s the native mountain ash, Sorbus scopulina, lighting up a dark corner of the garden.
On the left in this picture is where he’s putting up the fence and ripping out all the plants. I know what’s coming next but I don’t want to think about it much. A giant pile of gravel.
That’s me at the bottom of this picture. I was helping, with the atmosphere and all.
The sun was starting to come up in earnest now (like I guess it always does), and this last picture, a peep into the jardin exotique, was taken without the tripod so it’s kind of fuzzy. Like me.
I guess that’s it. After making the guy I live with get up so early I’ve decided to go back to bed, like any sensible creature. He drank too much coffee and so now he’s awake, which is so pathetic.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
A bunny’s delicious paradise. 😉
Or an owl’s ….the bunnies weren’t up that early.
Dawn light is so fragile. I appreciated seeing the morning develop. So many trees! Is it much of a chore to mark your territory, Chess?
Mostly giant shrubs, really. Funny thing, the guy I live with had some visitors over, not the usual rock gardening visitors, and one of them asked if he had a favorite tree that he could pee behind.. The guy I live with was at a loss for words. Which is rare, believe me.
My grampy is up before dawn every day, even in midsummer when it gets light mighty early in these parts. He says it’s because he has to make the donuts, but we think it’s because he’s just in the wrong time zone. My grammy waits til winter to get her dose of dawn light and then she loves watching the snow on the mountains ever so briefly turn pink as the sun first comes up, but for most of the year, she says catching the late afternoon light is good enough for her.
Indeed. We just got up because we weren’t asleep, and I was suddenly hungry. The guy I live with said we had to wait until he could see before we went on our walk, which is silly, because I can see, and it’s my walk.
If we’d gone in the dark, it wouldn’t’ve rained on us like it did when we went later.
Up at dawn, patrolling the perimeter? I’m exhausted just reading about it.
The photo of the ash in the dawnzer’s lee light is oh, so delish. That’s something you can only get on camera unless you’re John Singer Sargent. Which nobody has been for a long, long time.
Got a nap later on.
The guy I live with used to call the American flag a “dawnzer flag” when he was little, and no one knew why. The dawnzerly light, of course.
When he and my mommy went to NYC for a lecture tour he took her to the Met, and she was, to say the least, agog. She ogled the Sargents to no end, even though Madame X was away on tour. The almost equally famous one of Mr. and Mrs. Whatchamacallit was there, though. She was a huge admirer of Sargent. (Also of the Wyeths, and she got to go to the museum on the Brandywine.)
My mommy wanted the guy I live with to buy them a New York apartment, and he just rolled his eyes.
Border collies in Central Park, after dark. Kosher delis with the pastrami piled so high you can barely see over it. Et cetera.