Greetings and salutations 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 posts as “Below Normal” and “Revenge Of The Rodents”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose. The bunches of grass and stuff in front of me is what the guy I live with calls our “lawn”. 
It was really hot today, though the guy I live with says it wasn’t all that hot, that I was just being a wimp. For one thing, he insisted on shampooing the carpet again (I have told you, repeatedly, that he’s kind of a nut), which raised the humidity in the house to about a zillion percent, and for another thing, I wasn’t the only one who thought it was hot.
Two against one. It was hot.
Some time yesterday these plants appeared on the patio.
When my mommy was here, she would have asked, in a voice rather louder and more stern than usual, where exactly all these plants were supposed to go, since the garden is a bit full as it is. There are two manzanitas (Arctostaphylos pungens) on the left, four oaks (Quercus undulata), and a mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus breviflorus).
I thought we already had a Cercocarpus breviflorus.
The guy I live with said that this one was possibly a hybrid, between Cercocarpus breviflorus and C. montanus. So of course we had to have “the real thing”, too.
He also said, when I wondered about the oaks, that he had this idea. I was thrilled. “Lawn oaks”, he said. You can see one of the little oaks in the very first picture, out of focus on the right. Okay, I admit, not very many other people have lawn oaks. You may be able to tell that the guy I live with has recovered from the trauma of the week before last. Partly recovered, anyway. He says the lawn oaks will be a big help.
Well…..I’ll change the subject now, and show some plant pictures.
Haberlea rhodopensis
This next one, “Viette’s dwarf form” of comfrey, isn’t very dwarf, but has been here “since before there were border collies”, that is, in the Dark Ages here, back when the guy I live with desperately wanted a watered, “eastern-style” garden, which didn’t work out as well as he thought it would, this climate being “noted for general awfulness” and all that other whiny stuff. Whatever, huh. The garden isn’t like that at all any more, but the comfrey still lives. I’m not sure what he was focusing on here. 
Let’s keep going.
Penstemon cyananthus
Gymnocalycium baldianum
Echium amoenum, extra cherry-red form
Salvia phlomoides
So that was our day. I roasted, and the guy I live with took pictures and planted oaks in the lawn and did other stuff. I guess tomorrow will be about the same. Oh well.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
I am certain, Chess, that oaks in the lawn will be helpful against hail … in about twenty years. I am in favor of oaks anytime. If I had the right property, I would grow oaks. The internet respite where the guy you live with read the camera’s operating instructions has paid off as these are some terrific photos. The colors! Love the greens, the blues, the purples, the pinks, the white. Although, perhaps it’s not the intake of instructions so much as the advent of Spring. Whatever. Seems to be, Chess, a run of prostrate animals at your estate. Perhaps the drinking water? Love your portraits. Horticulture posture in the garden is, of course, the glamor shot. And then we’re treated to the captivating “Chess waiting through the boring bits” or perhaps you’re contemplating the appearance of the next biscuit. The carpet upon which you loll is surely well-shampooed.
Thanks; yes, reading the instructions made a difference. And this is just on the point-and-shoot (Canon G15); there are instructions for the DSLR too, but I think that might be too much for him at present. Prostrate animals, because it’s been so hot, and, for us, humid. The humidity was sixteen percent today. “A steam bath.” To tell the truth, there are so many oaks here it’s ridiculous. About two dozen. All scrub oaks, except there is one crossed with a post oak, and maybe in a hundred years it’ll look like something. Most of them are very tiny. The guy I live with likes them because once they get their roots down they’ll grow with zero irrigation, and even zero rain. A couple of years ago we had less than seven-tenths of an inch (about 1.8cm) of rain from mid-July to the end of December, and there was some talk of watering the front yard, but he didn’t do it, and nothing bad happened. The front yard oaks were fine.
Here on the shores of the Long Island Sound (where 90% humidity on a Summer day can be achieved without any help from rain or rain clouds, even) we give our DoGs a seasonal trim. The other day I saw my neighbor’s King Charles Spaniel with his Summer crew cut and he looked like a completely different dog. He looked like a baby bulldog, and baby bulldogs are unbelievably cuuuuute. My Cocker Spaniel is going this week to the vet’s groomer to get her flouncy coat drastically shortened. From experience I know that her fur will feel like velvet and she will look like a beagle. Is it a breech of pure bred boarder collie esthetics to shave off the Winter woolies?
Chess, the Guy You Live With must be part Doolittle the way the rabbits and the squirrels don’t flinch when he’s around. Squirrels and rabbits are known to be antsy creatures but there they are, in the Peaceable Chessdom, with nary a twitch or a tic. It can’t all be down to the heat. There must be a vibe o’er the land of the thousand oaks, or there’s something in the water, in which case I would gladly drink from that garden hose.
My mommy and the guy I live with stayed at the home of gardeners near Oyster Bay back in January of 1999. It rained a little, which was very different. My mommy was enchanted with the house, and the woods and stuff, but the people who lived there said they have to leave L.I. during the summer and head out West. (The next stop was at an apartment in Manhattan, where the enchantment level rose to fever pitch, to the point where my mommy told the guy I live with that she wanted an apartment in Manhattan…..) When it gets hot here, the guy I live with soaks me with the hose. I only like that after it’s done. He also got an “undercoat rake”, with which he can rake out huge amounts of undercoat, which contributes to the sense of well-being. The guy I live with is pretty well armed, so maybe the animals are aware of that, and tremble in fear of his wrath. He has a pink squirtgun, and an orange one, as a backup, in case a squirrel wrestles the pink one away from him. And, of course, me, to add a general atmosphere of terror and foreboding.