Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Much Less Roasting”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with said my hind feet weren’t positioned properly, so I adjusted them. 
I may have talked about this bed before. It’s just a mattress on top of box springs, and is fairly ancient. (There is another bed downstairs.) The reason why the guy I live with hasn’t purchased a new bed is because, as he says, it’s much easier for aging purebred border collies to climb onto. Much younger purebred border collies like to lie on it like I’m showing.
The pictures above were taken a couple of days ago. It rained for a few minutes, that day. Not enough to do much of anything for the garden, but it cooled off nicely afterward.
You can see that the garden looks pretty dry. These are pictures of the usual places that get taken pictures of.
There’s a temporary fence around the sagebrush because I kept getting in there, looking for snakes.
The squirrel has been tearing apart pine cones and strewing the remains all over the patio. This is me patrolling for squirrels. Some of the chewed-up pine cones were swept up before this picture was taken. They were used as mulch. 
The guy I live with repotted some plants which he had purchased in small pots. He says they need to be repotted, because if he planted these out into the garden, with their tiny root balls, they would die within a week.
The plants were labeled Michauxia tchihatchewii, but he explained to me that these are really M. campanuloides, and that all plants in the trade are M. campanuloides. Which is okay since this is a nice plant. “The real M. tchihatchewii has erect stems with flowers clustered all around the stem. It’s even cooler.” If you look up this species on Google you will see images which are mostly M. campanuloides, with one or two correctly identified as M. tchihatchewii.
Yesterday was the guy I live with’s birthday. He and his friend went to the Lavender Festival at Chatfield, part of Denver Botanic Gardens. I slept in my fort.
Since I was so refreshed, I decided to do some patrolling late at night. I ran outside and started racing around the garden. The guy I live with jumped out of his chair, with a start, the way he always does, and started yelling at me to come inside. I admit I kind of ignored him, but eventually I did come in. I got a lecture when I came into the kitchen. The guy I live with was really angry with me for not coming in right away.
I still wanted to go outside, and didn’t know why I couldn’t. There was something out in the garden which I had never seen before.
It wasn’t a cat, and it wasn’t a squirrel. It was striped, black and white, and had a fluffy tail. There was sort of a funny smell around it.
The guy I live with said I smelled just like that smell. So of course I got onto the bed to think about that for a while. He said it could have been much, much worse, and told me stories of Slipper and Chess, the purebred border collies who lived here before me, who met creatures like the one I described. I could tell by the way he talked about it, a bit loudly to my mind, that he thought the things that could have happened were really bad, but to me they just sounded interesting.
The guy I live with said he had no idea how this striped creature got into the back yard. He said he would look around.
I might, too.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Ha! Skunk! When we lived in skunk country our girl would come upon them and bark and bark. She would take the full brunt of skunkness right into her mouth and breathe out the essence for what seemed like months. It happened again and again. She was half border collie but apparently not the smart half.
The guy I live with says the not-border-collie half is the smart half. I take some offense at that. He described foaming at the mouth, stinky oil all over the face, and I think he was trying to make it sound horrible. Instead of, you know, an adventure.
The garden looks splendid in the rain, not as dry as you tell us the guy you live with makes it out to be. And I believe the delightful video puts the lie to his observation that it never rains in summer. I understand about mislabeling “in the trade.” There’s many a fair rose, mislabeled, to which have I given home. I also believe your guy was *very brave* to build a fence in an area in which he thought there might be snakes (shudder). When he ventured into the sagebrush, did he yell, “Yippee Yi Kayay”? You possess a marvelous sense of mischief, Mani, as your last portrait illustrates. Never have I seen a better show of “Dog Contemplating Mischief.”
The guy I live with said “Ha”. We got about one and a half millimeters from that rain. If you embiggen the first picture, after the movie, you can see all the wilted leaves on the cowpen daisies. The movie was almost the whole rain we got, if that makes sense. He said he was going to do a post on the “back border”; the border along the fence in the back. The soil there is so dry, and dry down beyond the depth of a shovel blade, that it’s difficult to get anything going there. “Untold numbers” of shrubs and trees have died back there. He’s going to try again, though. He planted some shrubs and used a root waterer, which I found very interesting indeed. The root waterer made a really funny noise. I never contemplate mischief. As you know, I am super angelic, and rarely do anything untoward. The guy I live with just overreacts.
What clever titles to your adventures:)
Thanks. As you may know, we purebred border collies are extremely clever.
I think you had a close call!
Closer than anyone wanted. The kitty was just a couple of feet away from me…..
Previous posts. I get the hops and rabbit brush! Really interesting to see your visit to Cistus. I have not been for two years, which is dumb, because it’s only four hours round trip.
The snake story had me scared and then mightily relieved.
The guy I live with has been moping ever since. But he still putters around in the garden. And is wary of things slithering in the grass, and hissing. As am I.