Greetings and salutations everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and most interesting news from our garden. You may remember me from such interesting posts as “Gloomy Weather” and “A Moment Of Fear”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a squinting pose. The sun was out today, briefly. 
It’s thundering over the mountains, to the west, and the forecast is for “heavy rain”. I don’t like thunderstorms. The guy I live with says that maybe this summer won’t be like last summer, where I heard thunder almost every day.
Yesterday was hot, and some of us didn’t like it much. 
Other creatures just clung to stuff. Clinging to stuff is a good refuge, sometimes. This is the white-lined sphinx again. 
Here’s Echinocereus triglochidiatus var. mohavensis forma inermis–no, seriously–flowering. The guy I live with grew this from seed. Inermis, by the way, doesn’t mean “really big”, it means “without spines”, though as you can see this plant has spines, which is why some botanists say it should just be called ‘Inermis’ or “the spineless form”, but of course only when it really is spineless. That’s an asphodel in the way, there.
And the pink form of Echinocereus coccineus. He messed up the color on this one, a little. 
Buds on Gymnocalycium baldianum.
Anyway, today, the guy I live with decided that it was time to move the seed pots around. Some of the little plants are beginning to need more sun (though this doesn’t seem like the place to talk about sun, these days), and so he started to move pots. He moved a few, while I watched, and then realized this was going to be a lot more work than he thought, and so he stopped.
This seed pot almost got thrown out.
That little green thing is Phlox opalensis, a highly desirable rock garden “microphlox”, and it was saved.
But he also took a bunch of pictures of seedlings, which I’m supposed to show you, even though most people would consider this to be boring. “If you don’t include some boring parts, the interesting parts won’t seem as interesting”, he told me, and though I doubt this, here goes anyway.
Oh, and by the way, if you’ve never heard of these plants, that’s okay. Neither had I. The guy I live with said that “some are so rare they’ve never even heard of themselves”, which made me feel better, I guess.
Acantholimon curviflorum
Dianthus pumilus subsp. arpadianus
Achillea umbellata
Alyssum dasycarpum
Matthiola anchoniifolia
Jurinea cadmea
Anthemis cretica subsp. leucanthemoides
Achillea sipkorensis
Whew, huh. A whole bunch of Turkish alpine plants. Also he has a “bumper crop” of bitterroots, Lewisia rediviva.
Lewisia rediviva
So that’s it. Not to end on a boring note, here’s a picture of me lying under the kitchen table. It’s a pretty good place to be when it thunders. Or when I’m not in my fort, or lying beneath the living room window guarding stuff, or just at any time of the day. 
That’s really all I have for today. I hope you weren’t too hugely bored looking at all the seedlings. The guy I live with says he hopes it rains, but just rains, if you know what I mean, but not so much that the creek floods. He wants everything just so, doesn’t he?
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Good morning Chess from grey miserable Bowral in the Southern Highlands. My mum and I are ‘camping’ so to speak in a 24ft caravan at the moment and it is currently 12C inside. So hoping the sun will come out today. It is nice to see your guys seedlings, my mums plants are still at the rental and several trees which she grew from seed have died, she is not happy about that but what can you do. Sorry about the thunder there I hope that goes away too. That squiirrel looks totally out of it. A great way to end with cute pics of you under the table, but I do like the first pose of you squinting.
The guy I live with had to look up Bowral. “ In a past era, Bowral served as a rural retreat for the elite gentry of Sydney, resulting in the establishment of many historic estates and manor houses in the district.” (Wikipedia.) We live in a manor house here. It’s rather old, and large, with several fireplaces, a kitchen with an Aga stove, and nooks and crannies everywhere, and little hallways on the upper floors ending in small windows, through which you can look out over the estate, on a wet afternoon such as this one. It smells faintly of pipe tobacco, leather chairs, books, and, of course, old money. The guy I live with says I’ve only seen part of it, which is why that description sounds totally made up to me. Having plants die that you patiently raise from seed can be very discouraging. It happens here all the time, but it’s still discouraging. We had what some people call a “frog strangler” here, though the guy I live with likes frogs, and so did my mommy. It was a lot of rain, and now it smells good outside. I have to wait to go on my walk because it’s still thundering. The guy I live with shampooed the living room carpet yesterday and now guess what’s going to happen when we come back from my walk?
We both so had a laugh at your last sentence…
Dear Chess, you seem to have an instinct for just the right spot for the occurrence of the moment, and are cute about it. The squirrel seems to have some sort of instinct going on too. I do hope that bit of railing was in the shade at the time. Very good close-up of the moth, its lines are so beautiful. The guy you live with has ideas about where to embed all those plants, I hope. Pretty good generation rate from seed, but then he takes such care with the process. Right now we have a rare California native grape (purple, not the usual red) growing over the front wall waving at passersby. My husband thinks inspiration for latticework will hit him as he roams the countryside about Winchester when we’re there in two weeks. Both our terriers received shampoos today, one is now blindingly Maltese white, the other shines like Dandy Dinmont pewter, and the bathroom smells like the dogs used to. No thunder expected, though Petey and Shredder consider shampoos near to thunder on the scale of scary. We’re sympathetic here about the horror of loud noises.
A lot of the seedlings found a new home today; hopefully they’ll flourish in crevice gardens at DBG. There are still so many, and more that haven’t germinated yet. The guy I live with says that some plants will wait until June or July to germinate. Lots of planting out done in August and September here. My understanding is that I need a shampoo, but I hope that’s just the usual talk. Shampoos are pretty close to thunder, though firecrackers are probably the worst. The railing was in semi shade. The gnaw marks on it are from my buddy Slipper, who gnawed wood when he got excited, like if the guy I live with brought home some Stilton or something. Next to that was a place where the squirrel started gnawing at the wood for some reason and so some chicken wire got put over it to stop the gnawing. I don’t chew on wood any more.
One can almost find oneself feeling sorry for that squirrel…..but then I snap out of it and say “naaaaah!”
Probably planning something extremely naughty, huh.
I understand Chess why he stopped moving pots around. Reading labels and deciding what pots to move can be darn taxing in that kind of heat! Finding homes for them is a job for cooler weather. Nice to see the flowers on the cactus types! How many years from seed to flower? And the baby seedlings that need repotting….. Ahh, so the guy you live with celebrated the one seed that germinated. Does the Phlox opalensis have another name? Must add it to my wish list of plants to grow native to Wyoming.
Wish we had your thunder and rain but Lucky Cat here would be under the table just like you.
It takes about twenty years from seed to flower. Really. That’s because the guy I live with doesn’t have a greenhouse, and previously sowed the cactus seeds outside in winter, and just waited. Now the seeds are sown under lights, on a heating mat, in the laundry room, but it still takes a long time for them to get really big. (It’s sometimes easier to order cactus plants from places like Mesa Garden or Beaver Creek.) Phlox opalensis is a recently-described species. It was previously thought to be quite rare, but extensive new populations were found in the mid 90s. “ P. opalensis occurs primarily on pinkish-colored clay-shale slopes covered with a surface layer of reddish sandstone and chert.” (Among other places; this is from the status report.) The guy I live with says we don’t have any chert, but plan to grow the phlox anyway. Now he says we need a “chert garden”. Phlox seed is expensive because it’s difficult to collect. The seed kind of pops out and flies away, if you’re not careful. So, say, six dollars for ten seeds. Sowing them in pots outdoors in January works pretty well, though not all the seeds germinate, as the one plant in the pot shows. So what he does here is simply overturn the pot and plant the whole thing, rather than just the one plant. Sometimes the seeds germinate the next spring. Seed came from Alplains.
What plant people call “opalensis” is what gemology people call “opalescence”. It sounds like the kind of dirt in which your Phlox likes to grow in is exactly the kind of sedimentary deposits where opals like to grow, too. By any chance, where those new populations of P. opalensis found in Coober Pedy?
Chess dear, you have some competition in the cuteness dept this week…Earl looks insanely cuuuuuute in the heat. And that photo of the white-lined sphinx moth is stunning. I would love to live in a world where sphinx moths were the size of house cats and as domesticated as dairy cows so I could keep a herd of them and pet their furry little heads. But alas, I live in the best of all worlds, where pure bred border collies are just the right size and there’s always a kitchen table for protection against thunder.
No; very funny. My mommy loved opals. The phlox was named for the town of Opal, Wyoming (pop.96), whereabouts the phlox is found. The suffix –ensis meaning, like, “from”. Early botanists working in North America called everything “canadensis” or “carolinensis”, probably figuring they’ve have their location bases covered that way. There is always the kitchen table to hide under, or for shade. The guy I live with says that sphinx moths (technically, hawk moths) tickle when he catches them in his hands, to put them back outside.
I love the deep red of the flower on the allegedly without spines plant that has spines — that took 20 years to flower?! Reading that made me realize that I’ve never lived 20 years in any one house nor one city, either. Eleven & a half years is the max in one house.
Twenty years is about right….grown the slow way. Maybe fifteen years would be more realistic; the seeds were sown some time in the early 90s, but the plants may have bloomed for the last several years. The garden in which they’re in (several plants) isn’t watered, and so time slows to a halt. Mesa Garden sells plants for four dollars (US). A greenhouse would make a lot of things easier, though it would have to be covered with hail cloth.