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 show you pictures taken on a day I was left at home, alone. You may remember me from such lonely posts as “Left Alone” and the other “Left Alone”, and “Home Alone Once Again” and “Left Alone Again”, among so many, many others in which I was left alone.
Here I am in a characteristic pose, glad to have the guy I live with home again, and glad to have gone on my afternoon walk, and glad for the fan blowing moderately cool air on my personal self.
As you can probably tell by the title of today’s post, the guy I live with left me alone and drove to Boulder, to Harlequin’s Gardens. We’ve shown pictures of the nursery before, but feel like showing more today. It’s how we are, you know. (By the way, these are really big files, so you can embiggen them by clicking on them.)
It was a sunny, albeit slightly hazy and humid day. It rained a lot, if you’ll recall. Humidity was an “awful” thirty percent.
Harlequin’s is in north Boulder, and is reached by a suitably lonely dirt road.
looking southeast toward Denver
looking northeast
looking to the north, past the nursery
looking back, southwest, sort of, to the nursery
looking at the Flatirons, South Boulder Peak, and Devil’s Thumb
entrance
native grasses
lots of roses
Here’s a view looking almost west. It has a certain lonely look which the guy I live with says is very appealing. I like it better when he’s at home. Which he is now.
That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed the pictures, even if they weren’t all of me.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
After reading this post, Chess, I feel like I’ve been on tour to Colorado. The thing about travel is sometimes places fall flat and soon stale because we have seen the sights so often in photographs or video. The Colorado you show can never be other than fresh. Harlequin looks an excellent nursery in which to root around and just the plant place for the guy you live with, given his preference in gardens. The native grasses make a convincing case for themselves. I like the shot of the lone car on the dirt road, and also the lonely mountain vista. Best of all is happy Chess back from his walk with the guy he lives with on the other end of the leash.
Thanks; Harlequin’s is really fun, because it’s so different. And yet they sell zillions of own-root roses, modern and old-fashioned. The guy I live with really likes roses, but is into a different phase now. There are still the four ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ in my mommy’s little garden, and ‘Veilchenblau’, and some species here and there. And besides, a lot of talk on the local gardening mailing list has been about Japanese beetles, which some people have here. What is the world coming to? The guy I live with’s sister has them, and she tried Dr. Bronner’s, and that worked. Oh, there was one time when the guy I live with got really mad at my mommy (briefly), because she jammed a bunch of roses into the back of the Ford Focus they used to have (he gave away the car after she died), and the roses were smack up against the windows of the hatchback, and they went to the Pearl Street Mall, like they used to, and all the roses totally fried, sitting in the back of the car. “Important safety tip.” Being home is best of all, for us, anyway.
Thanks for posting larger files for enbiggenment. It saved me the embarrassment of asking what the large pine in the photo with the Acantholimons was. By zooming in I can now tell it is a Cylindropuntia the size of a golf cart.
Amazing, is it not? It’s been heavily pruned, the tips cut regularly, so that it’s evolved into this huge burly thing that, according to Mikl, the owner and pruner, is never damaged by heavy, wet snow in spring. Cylindropuntia imbricata is native to eastern Colorado as far north as about Security, just south of Colorado Springs (as well as much farther south). The native plants are often broken by wet snow, but they propagate themselves that way. The ones in the front yard here now have thick woody trunks, but are sometimes broken by snow. There’s a picture of Mikl’s pruned cylindropuntia in High and Dry, I think.
Low humidity and mountain vistas– do you realize that you reside in a paradise? My grammy sends her gracious thanks for the photo tour, as here it is flat and foggy and we have mushrooms growing behind our ears.
Paradise, with icky weather for border collies, which I hope has passed now. The guy I live with says that some summers can be like that here, since I tend to forget, and think things will always be the same, once they start to be the same, I mean. Border collie logic. He also says that now that I have a water dish for traveling, I might get to go on rides that don’t always end up at the same place….
It’s monsooning at this very minute in our area, so I’m afraid it’s a bit more of more of the same for Border Collies a few days hence.
They say on Monday. If it doesn’t thunder, and just rains, that would be okay. Though, our little neighborhood here doesn’t get very much summer rain, unless it’s upslope, which it was a few days ago.
Lovely tour of the garden
Thanks.
More pictures here, https://paridevita.com/2012/07/10/trip-to-harlequins/ here https://paridevita.com/2012/07/11/trip-to-harlequins-part-two/
and here https://paridevita.com/2013/07/16/trip-to-harlequins-gardens/
Kind of the same pictures, but life is like that, too.
Chess, Please inform the guy you live with that here in Georgia we consider 30% to be LOW humidity! Be thankful for the drier air you are blessed with out west. Love the blog. More comments later. Randy
Thanks. The guy I live with says in the South they don’t trust air they can’t feel…. Right now, at 9:05 p.m. , it’s 68F and 55 percent humidity.
The stars are out, too. (Funny expression.)