Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the still roasting-hot purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you more news about our roastingly hot garden. You may remember me from such heat-related posts as “Super Roasting”, among so many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. This is what you do when it’s hot for days on end.
Sometimes the heat does get to you, and you look like this.
Maybe you can see how dry the garden is, in that picture. It’s dry. The guy I live with says it might never rain again. It looks like it’s going to rain, almost every day. Very gloomy, but still hot. This picture might look like rain, but the guy I live with says that nature is faking it. 
Sometimes I get bored and play with grasshoppers. I admit that the guy I live with can be quite a hoot, at times, but grasshoppers are pretty interesting. 
He said to make sure not to eat the grasshopper, because then I might get all jumpy.
Let’s look at some things in the garden, now. This the native “cowpen daisy”, Verbesina encelioides. It’s an annual. An unhappy annual. 
Here’s the lilac, ‘Victor Lemoine’, with drooping leaves. 
You can see how gloomy it is here. You can’t really see how hot it is, or how dry, but it is gloomy. 
The “lawn” is really pathetic. The guy I live with said he was going to fix that. Eventually. 
The “way back” is super dry, too. The buffalo grass looks okay, but it gets watered about once a week. 
Not everything is totally gloomy, of course. The Tecoma ‘Orange Jubilee’ is flowering. It’s in a big pot on the patio and gets water. It takes a little bit of frost, so if it gets left out on the patio by mistake, it doesn’t die. The leaves get all wrecked, but they grow back. There’s also the yellow-flowered Tecoma stans, in a pot, that’s been here for decades. The lady of the house grew it from seed, and it’s been left out in freezing weather more than once. And allowed to dry out and drop all its leaves, too. 
And even though there aren’t very many flowers here, the hummingbirds are still happy. 
Because it’s so thundery in the evenings, I only go on my morning walks. The other day I was just walking along, the way you do, and the guy I live with said I almost stepped on a huge bullsnake. He said I wasn’t very observant. But I was on my walk, after all, and when you’re on a walk, walking is what you do. Walking and sniffing. Not looking around for enormous snakes that might swallow you. That’s the guy I live with’s job, to make sure that doesn’t happen.
And so, then, there was another horticultural crisis. It may have been partly my fault. The neighbor got a new dog, and I wanted to meet it, and bark at it a lot, and things like that. The guy I live with had to put up another fence (he says I’ll learn not to race and leap through the garden, when I get older, but I doubt it), and then when I stood on the two troughs in the corner, to try to see over the fence, he decided to move them. He said that Slipper, who lived here a while ago, stood on troughs too, and broke one, once, but that it was the guy I live with’s fault, because of the way the trough was placed.
The guy I live with said the troughs weigh at least two hundred pounds each (about ninety-one kilograms), but he has a method of moving them, which he showed in an earlier post. (Though, this time, he didn’t break a trough at the end.)
So the troughs are moved, and now there is this space. The soil is “beyond awful”. 
It’s possible that either a great deal of thought will be put into deciding which plant, or plants, will go here (keeping in mind that I need to be able to look through the fence), or that no thought at all will go into the decision, and the guy I live with will just get something, plant it, and the plant will die. That happens a lot.
That piece of vintage steel garden fence on the right protects a plant of Clematis × triternata ‘Rubromarginata’ (whew) which isn’t quite dead yet.
A shipment of bulbs came today. Maybe if you looked at the other pictures you can guess why the guy I live with likes bulbs so much. (They’re underground all summer.)
It may surprise you to learn that sometimes these posts take quite a bit of time to prepare. When I started this post, things were all gloomy and roasting. And then this happened.
This isn’t enough rain to make the plants happy, but it’s enough to cool things off so I’m not so roastingly hot. And that’s what really counts.
The guy I live with says it’s supposed to cool off even more by this weekend, and maybe even rain some more. That sounds okay to me. 
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Mani – if you get some time in your busy schedule of walking and posing, can you tell us what was in those interesting packets of bulbs? Where did the guy you live with get them? I recently got some from Janis Ruksans in Latvia – have you heard of him?
Andrewr
Yes, we do get bulbs from Latvia. See the post called “The Happy Elephant”. These new bulbs, mostly fritillarias, came from Illahe Rare Bulbs, which is here in the States. A short list is published on a blog, and the bulbs sell out within minutes. The guy I live with said something about the early bird….
Mani, you are cute as a bug in a rug. So glad it rained a bit to relieving your roasting.
Thanks. I agree….. We got about six millimeters of rain, which isn’t bad at all.
It poured rain for almost an hour in Idaho Springs after work yesterday. We had much thunder and lightning, too. Clear Creek is very wet this morning. Don’s grass is still crunchy, though. Two weeks of heat and no rain in July killed the grass in the sunny part of the yard. Tobydog likes to roll in it.
It didn’t rain very much here, but it rained for two hours, and that was nice.
Rain for two hours! Oh! the weather remains boring here — sun sun sun, relentless sun. Your rain photo is on the cusp of pornographic. In the first photo, Mani, you look as if contemplating the wisdom contained in those books. And when you show us a photo of you being hot, well, you look pretty happy. The garden clearly holds a lot of interest even in the roasting season, but perhaps one has to be tutored to see summer charm. The cowpen daisy is cute, and I think the tecoma is a showoff. The final photo of you, Mani, between the trees indicates there might exist some cooler spots within the garden. Here’s hoping you soon get to meet your neighbor dog. Does the dog bark back? Suggest to the guy you live with you had provocation in the downing of the fence.
The dog next door doesn’t bark back, which is very frustrating. It’s like I’m being completely ignored. Which, according to the guy I live with, is probably just as well. He seeded a lawn there, for dogs to roll in and stuff, which was allowed to die almost immediately, and so that was that. Enough said. The cowpen daisy doesn’t flower until later in the year. It’s pretty delightful. I know because they have it around the horse pasture next to where I go for Day Care. I almost hate to say it, but right now, at 11:09 p.m., Mountain Daylight Time, here, it’s raining. It might not last long.