Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on all the news, after kind of a long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “The Tour Guide”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been really hot and ickily humid (for us; most people wouldn’t notice it); the guy I live with has been working out in the garden, but not constantly, because of the heat.
He said there hasn’t been much of anything going on worthy of a post, and maybe there still isn’t.

Just today he did some work in the front yard. He said the mahonia, which was sown by a bird ages ago, needed to go because its leaves were “too glossy green” for the front yard, so he dug it up. Some rooted branches were saved and are in pots next to the patio.

He went over to a nursery yesterday to get a couple more Hesperaloe campanulata. You can see one of the new ones on the left, behind the Yucca schottii. The other new one is behind the existing one and I guess you can’t really see it.
It’s much different from the usual Hesperaloe parviflora you see everywhere here; the guy I live with tried to take new pictures of the flowers today, but they were closed, because it’s been sprinkling on and off.
Here’s the picture of the flowers he posted on Facebook the other day.
The Colorado four o’clock, Mirabilis multiflora, is flowering too, in the front yard. (The plant actually sprawls onto the driveway.)
And there are tiny acorns on Quercus undulata, also in the front yard.

The garden in back looks pretty good after the rain we had at the beginning of June.
That bunch of Aster oblongifolius to the right of me is going to go; the guy I live with says it’s “too green”. I guess he means too much uninterrupted green. There are dozens of other plants of it in the garden anyway. It seeds everywhere.
It’s on the left, in the picture below.
The Salvia sclarea var. turkestanica has also seeded all over the garden, and is really starting to flower now.
Speaking of flowering, the buffalo grass in my Private Lawn is flowering, too.
The hose is there because one part started to dry out for some reason. Buffalo grass really doesn’t need much water, though it does need some.
The guy I live with said he might not mow it this year. If it gets mowed, then it needs to be watered.

Oh, the title of my post. The guy I live with posted a picture of the rose, ‘Darlow’s Enigma’, on Facebook (this is a different picture), and also said something about the haiku.
The guy I live with’s wife carved the haiku into the wood. She was really into haiku. One time a nurseryman friend said he would trade haiku for some plants that were really hard to get, so she wrote some haiku and they got some plants.

There was a garden tour once where one person insisted on stopping and reading each haiku aloud to everyone else, even though they all wanted to move on to another part of the garden.
Kind of like going to the checkout line at the grocery store and asking if something is in stock, rather than going to the customer service desk, and holding up everyone else in line.
Or like shooting off fireworks at this time of year. They’re illegal, but people do it anyway.
The guy I live with says people can be self-centered at times.
But now when he stops to look at the haiku he doesn’t just think of how happy his wife was, building the pergola and carving the haiku with a Dremel tool, he also thinks of that unpleasant incident.
And when he thinks of the Fourth of July, he thinks of frightened purebred border collies, and has for over thirty years.

The guy I live with also got the new license plates for our car. He said it was a relief, because it felt strange driving around with temporary plates for so long. Not that he goes to very many places.
He says it’s a bit different, but nice, to have a car that says “See you” when he gets out of the car after parking it in the garage.

I guess that’s all. I’ll leave you with a picture of me in a very relaxed state.

Until next time, then.