Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you what’s happened since the storms. You may remember me from such work-related posts as “A Bit Of Work”, among at least a few others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m looking at a bee in the grass.
There’s still water flowing in the creek, but it looks clear and clean now. Instead of being all muddy. I didn’t go in, though the guy I live with said I could.
There’s no water in the canal, though. Maybe the lake it flows to is full with all the rain. You can see that they mowed on either side, just to make it ugly, I guess.
The canal was dug in the 1880s. The concrete is part of an old sluice that let water flow to a farmhouse, which is long gone.
And as I said last time, the guy I live with found his penny.
It says 1966 on the other side. That seems like a very long time ago to me. It wasn’t so much for the “luck”, just that he found it in his wife’s things, and as I’ve showed before, there is quite a bit of stuff downstairs, especially in little boxes and tins.
There are some plants flowering; the guy I live with said he might rethink his idea of not having much in flower at this time of year, because the hail we had hardly did any damage at all. The rain flattened a lot of the grasses and other plants, and the path along the north side of the garden is impassable in places.
Salvia ringens is in flower now.
Ringens means “gaping”, in the sense of “showing teeth” (like I would do in my most deadly posture) and you can see that the flowers do that.
The plants themselves aren’t very easy to photograph.
The tops of the flowering stalks are taller than the guy I live with.
Salvia sclarea is flowering, too. They used to say this was variety turkestanica, but I guess no one says that now. It’s a really smelly plant. That’s feverfew in front of it. The guy I live with’s wife wanted that.
And the rose, ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ is really putting on a show after all the rain. You can smell it from pretty far away.
Of all things, there’s a snapdragon in flower.
Look at my Private Lawn. It’s ‘Cody’ buffalo grass, and only needs mowing once or twice a summer. It does need some water; if it doesn’t rain, the guy I live with sets a sprinkler back here maybe once every two weeks or so. It already needs to be mowed again, but it might not be, because if it gets mowed, it needs to be watered. He says the flowers are attractive.
Anyway, what he did yesterday and today was clear out the path between the raised bed in the center of the yard, and what used to be called The Long Border on the left.
The path was a real mess.
There were a bunch of grasses and other plants that had fallen over the path, so he took out all of them. (Those red flags mark little seedlings of Penstemon cyaneus, but they’ve probably been smothered by California poppies.) “Too many of the same plant”, he said, and so now the buffalo grass will fill in the whole path, probably by the end of the summer.
The Ground Shark got a lot of workout, let me tell you.
This is something the guy I live with had been thinking about for quite some time. He thinks and thinks, and then does something, and about half the time regrets what he just did. But not this time.
So that’s my update for today. And I guess it’s summer, because when the wind blows from the west, it’s scented by the ponderosa pines way up in the mountains on a nice, dry night.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Goodness, I had no idea that your neighborhood was so old! I still had relatives in that region back then. I suppose that I could still have relatives there now, but I am not acquainted with any of them. Salvia ringens looks almost silly on those tall floral stems. Is it also aromatic? Is Salvia mellifera available there? Salvia sclarea is naturalized in some isolated places in Oregon, and probably elsewhere. It sort of makes me wonder how it got to some of the places where it is now naturalized.
Well the neighborhood is only fifty years old. It was farmland before that.
Salvia mellifera wouldn’t be hardy here.
The farmland and associated infrastructure was old prior to the neighborhood though.
I did not consider the climate there relative to Salvia mellifera. I suppose it would not tolerate such cold winter weather.
It wouldn’t.
The guy I live with said he wasn’t sure what people were farming here. Maybe it was just houses and people needed water.
The Head Gardener here describes the smell from Salvia sclarea as very like toilet cleaner! We don’t grow it, as you might well have assumed.
Lovely to see the old penny, a coin of my childhood – cearc ‘s ál sicín – a hen and brood!
The guy I live withwouldn’t call it an old penny, since he was fifteen in 1966. (Lol.) Apparently there are “chickless” ones which are worth some money.
The salvia is pretty stinky. The guy I live with is not thrilled when I romp through it.
So glad the guy you live with found his penny. No mean feat outside. Are there hummingbirds at the salvias? I have a bunch of tender salvias I overwinter in the garage that the bees and hummingbirds go nuts over. the pathway looks good but wondering what a Ground Shark is?
There was a post about the Ground Shark a few posts ago. It’s a kind of spade with sharpened teeth.
Hummingbirds have been visiting Salvia ringens.
Salvia greggii also attracts hummingbirds but it flower a little in the spring and then a lot in autumn (common name, “autumn sage”) but only if it rains. Those salvias were killed back to the ground by our last winter, but have come back strongly.
Mee-yow THE flowerss are lookin so purrty there Mani!
An yore Buffalo Grass iss pawsum! Wee wish wee had that heer. Our so-called lawmss are more weedss than ackshual grass! Housin iss two CHEEP to due propurr lawn care or tree care.
An wee are so FURRY happy Guy found THE Penny! It iss a lovely mee-mentow fore him to carry with him! BellaSita has a flat agate of Huszband Kevin’ss shee carriess 😉
Happy walkiess mee frendss!
***nose bopss*** BellaDharma an (((hugss))) BellaSita Mum
Thanks. All the lawn grass and path grass here is buffalo grass, or blue grama. The blue grama is mostly in the tiny front lawn.
The penny is just a memento, but he was glad he found it again.
We planted some salvia years ago and while it provides nice color, it smells a bit like bad body odor. When it seeds itself in the flagstone, I have to get rid of it because of that hideous smell. So misleading…being lovely in bloom but oh-so stinky. Yuck!
It does smell kind of weird. But lots of plants do. And way better than the smell coming from next door. (The guy I live with says the smell from next door smells like Lysol and diesel fumes. And it’s not a faint smell, either.)