Namaste, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such excellent posts as “Carpets” and “Grace Under Pressure”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristically pathetic pose. Few creatures can look as pathetic as I can when the need arises. And it arose.
The guy I live with left me at home for hours today, to “work” at the Mother’s Day plant sale at Denver Botanic Gardens. He said it was a terrific sale. Big deal, I say, since I had to sit at home and stare out the window.
In the picture below, you can see pots of Caulanthus crassicaulis, one of the coolest of all native plants, and one the guy I live with has been searching for for many a moon. Imagine his excitement. (Because I can’t.) 
I’m kind of glad he didn’t bring this bird thing home with him. 
Actually, he didn’t take many pictures of the thousands of plants for sale, because he was too overwhelmed, but he did wind up going to the Rock Alpine Garden with Panayoti, because this is May and all, you know. This is the endangered plant garden. Physarias, I guess. 
And the crevice gardens. They seem to be peaking right now.
Looking toward the alpine house. The blue is from camassias. 
More crevice gardens.
Acanthus syriacus, a plant the guy I live with drools over. I know about drooling, but over a plant?
In front of the alpine house.
Behind the alpine house; the first crevice garden.
Another one, this time for shade-loving plants. 
Well, those were the pictures he took. He didn’t really work very much, which should surprise no one, but he bought a lot of plants, which also should surprise no one.
Back at home, I should show how he solved the problem of the two chairs and all the feng shui stuff.
genius at work
And then we had this visitor.
The hummingbird was probably mad that the guy I live with was so close to the Gilia (or Ipomopsis) aggregata.
Oh, and another penstemon is blooming. Penstemon angustifolius.
Well, that was his day. Aside from my walks, my day was pretty lonely and sad, as you can imagine, but I was a lot happier when he got home. Here I am looking that way. I discovered I can sit like this and move my hind feet up and down, which makes the guy I live with laugh, and he says he might make a movie of it some time. He better not. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Splendid … splendid … splendid.
Thanks. The guy I live with said he couldn’t take the DSLR, which takes better pictures of things like crevice gardens, because he was supposed to be “working” instead of wandering around buying stuff and looking at the rock garden, but maybe he’ll do that next week. Although …..we’re supposed to have a major snowstorm tomorrow, with huge piles of snow and end-of-the-world type stuff, and a low of 24F (-4.4C) on Monday night. And people wonder why we don’t grow annuals here. You don’t know when it’s safe to put them out. By August it usually is, anyway.
All that possibility lined up at the plant sale! Glad the guy you live with found the plant he’d been wanting forever (assume he bought it). That Acanthus is pretty amazing-looking. Your comment about drooling made me think about what might excite dogs as much as plants excite gardeners (what, other than food, I mean). Hm. Something to ponder.
Thank you for the photos of crevice planting. I really like how that looks, and it has me thinking ahead to next year and how I could landscape the pond area when the pond is gone. But it makes me tired thinking about lugging all those stones & placing them like that. But it’s a possibility.
I’m also enjoying seeing the feng shui in progress. Mystery and portent re: where those chairs will end up. So many possibilities.
The bird sculpture looks sort of like the sculptures of a well-known Louisville company, Yardbirds. Several years ago, I worked at a bird store in Louisville & we sold a LOT of the Yardbirds sculptures. I was kind of mind-boggled when my husband & I went on vacation to Sedona & walked into an artsy gift store there, only to see a big display of Yardbirds. Like I couldn’t get away from work, even on vacation. The sculpture in your photo is much more steampunk than the Yardbirds stuff, though.
There is, or was, a company called Steel Storks that sells things at the RMCNARGS chapter sale. The guy I live with says he wouldn’t be able to decided what to get, if anything, so it just has to be imaginary, like a lot of stuff. The chairs are on the trough patio in the way back. There was supposed to be a teak bench back there, but they cost money.
Seeing that Acanthus syriacus photo I am seriously regretting not buying one when I saw it at a recent plant sale. Next time…
Always had this rule, see something you desperately want, give in to the acquisitive instinct. Otherwise, next time, it might be gone.
Tried it from wild-collected seed maybe 25 years ago, nothing happened. Still want fairly desperately.
The biggest trouble is that if DBG reported mysterious large hole where acanthus formerly grew, everyone would now know who the prime suspect might be.
http://www.dancingoaks.com/home/dok/page_81/acanthus_syriacus.html
This was really helpful. The guy I live with said he wasn’t going to buy any more plants for this year, and so he only ordered two acanthuses. (He says you always order two.) He also never pays any attention to hardiness zones. In the east, they have to factor in something called “winter wet”, and on the west coast, the plants would never get a chance to harden off properly before cold struck, so a low of 10F might kill a plant there that would survive –20F here. Though he hastens to add that a whole bunch of stuff sold on the west coast would never make it here at all. Obviously. Which he sour grapes by saying that if we lived there I’d have to have nothing but water and crackers because all his money would go to plants. I like crackers okay but still. They’re better with something on them, like a slice of Brie or Stilton. Oh, there are other acanthuses here; A. spinosus, A. hirsutus, and A. balcanicus or hungaricus or whatever.
Chess – Sorry your day didn’t go your way. But I sure enjoyed looking at the pictures the guy you live with took!
Thanks; today was much better, and I can hardly wait to go on my walks in the snow they predict for tomorrow.
Again, more evidence of the botanical superiority of the good citizens of Colorado. Sigh.
Well, DBG is gorgeous, in a kind of sickening, makes-you-want-to-go-home-and-rototill-the-whole-garden sort of way. It changes constantly, too.
Chess, stop looking pathetic this instant! No doggie I’ve known does pathetic better than you. Advise the guy you live with to hand out the crackers WITH BRIE right now!
So, photos are seasonal, I can now make sense of crevice gardens where in other excursion photographs I had to take it on faith. Gorgeous. Not doable on our flat plot on our flat island, alas. Still, one can admire, and buy the terrific Acanthus syriacus, to plant flatly. Thanks, Deborah Farrell, I order tomorrow, Sunday being traditional interwebz order night. Segueing, love the new pot arrangement, and I have some o’ them pots. Perhaps … 92 degrees F here on Tuesday. BTW, asked my DBG curator friend Loddie about the crevice plantings when we met at the Huntington Gardens Great Rosarians thingie, whatever, in January, and she was puzzled. After a while, she remembered, oh, yeah, those new crevice gardens. Rose freaks evidently find it difficult to focus on Things Other. Or perhaps brain waves were disarranged journeying from Denver Blizzard to SoCal paradise. In closing, I loves me a high-end plant sale second only to a high-end vintage or thrift store. With brie aftermath. Keep those photographs coming.
You order tomorrow. Suppose that the two acanthuses the guy I live with ordered a couple of hours ago were the last two available. He can be acquisitive, you know. Though in a very narrow way; there are some things, in fact, lots of things, which he has learned to admire but not acquire. That’s why DBG is so excellent; he can go there and look at stuff and not desperately want it for the garden here. The pots’ll probably stay empty this summer. It’s a metaphor. (Actually, considering the 23 it’s supposed to be Monday night, filling the pots with stuff that would freeze seems totally pointless, and not only that, whatever was in there would have to be watered every day, which is a hopeless proposition, since I don’t water.) Thrift stores? The guy I live with talked to my vet about changing meds, because there’s this idea that the goofballs were causing me to gain weight (“gas weighing nothing, after all”, he says, rudely), and it would be to a people med, which he would get at the pharmacy, or at a place called “Costco”, which he has heard of, but never been to. He says he’ll go to the regular drug store he always goes to. (Thinking of that moment in Jacques Tati’s Playtime where the American woman asks M. Hulot what the French for “drug store” is, and he replies, “drug store”.) But anyway. I ramble. The guy I live with says that if it really does snow hugely tomorrow, he’ll take a cue from Henry Mitchell and keep all the curtains closed, and stay indoors except for my walks.
Uh, yes, the French for “drug store” is “le drug store.” Costco, to use your wording, Chess, is HUGELY inexpensive. You do NOT have to join, become a member, to use the pharmacy. Although, for our regular meds, we use our health provider (health net discount) because what we’re using is put on our computer record. Computer records are good, Chess, almost as good as brie. I think your guy is not so rude in his comments, dear doggie, as snide. You could advise him to “stop that” or you could – preferable – do the snide back. Which, come to think of it —
The guy I live with fixed the typo on “hugely”. Though there are other words for that, he says he’s a precisian. Or punctilious. My mommy made fun of him about stuff like that, but you should have seen her when it came to drawing, or the stuff she wrote that she would never let him see. (The unfinished novel, poetry, etc.)
Anyway, the guy I live with has stunningly excellent health insurance, and I have it too (through the ASPCA), though, curiously, he’s never filed a claim, even when he dragged me off to the emergency vet year before last. People ask him why he has insurance if he’s never made a claim, and his answer is “Because”. My mommy got it for me, and for my buddy Slipper, too, after the guy I live with retired.
Well, his therapist, whom he still sees, said when he first starting seeing her, right after my mommy died, that he didn’t really have to do anything he didn’t want to do, and so that was that. If he doesn’t feel like doing it, it doesn’t get done.
That’s not entirely true, though, because just this morning, he woke up early,and was lying there thinking about things he doesn’t want to think about, when “all of a sudden”, he says, I started whining for cuddles, and so I got a bunch, and instead of going back to sleep, we both got up and I had my breakfast, because it’s raining, and here, waking up to rain is so very unusual, it’s unusual.
He told me stories of when he was a little kid in Long Beach and he’d go to bed when it was raining, and wake up and it would be raining, and it would rain all day, but it almost never does that here. The rain either stops, or turns to snow. It’s supposed to do that today. He says the joy of waking up to rain and then watching it turn to snow is a metaphor like almost no other.
Where was I? I don’t know, now.
He says he thinks he saw the first snow start to fall, but I’m not so sure, since he doesn’t wear his glasses. I guess the flowers on the Russian hawthorn (Crataegus ambigua) could be frozen tomorrow night, which might be okay since they smell “like an outhouse in July”, but the dark red haws are attractive, and I and my buddy Slipper liked to graze on the fallen ones, even in the rock garden, which annoyed the guy I live with, which is partly why we did it, you know, then looking up totally innocently when we were told that we weren’t cows.