Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about our winter, so far. You may remember me from such posts as “The Caterpillars”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m way out by the back fence, if you couldn’t tell.
You can also see that most of our garden is still filled with snow.
The guy I live with says this is extremely tiresome and boring. Though he also says that having to worry about the opposite situation, “fire weather”, makes the boredom tolerable.
It seems like we can’t have a situation in between that, any more.
I think it’s boring, too, because I like to help the guy I live with when he works in the garden, which, in typical winters, could easily be in February.
I mean there is still stuff to do. The guy I live with learned today that our front garden is going to be dug up, again. There was a lot of heavy sighing, especially since this may involve thirty-year old shrubs which he can never replace.
And there are things happening inside. Just look at the Thai basil. It’s still green after almost two weeks.
The rooted basil is doing well, under lights. The lights make the color look weird.
And other things, coming up from seeds he sowed.
These are baby yuccas. (Yucca pallida.)
The guy I live with said he was going to order more seeds, “Just to have something to fiddle with”.
Maybe sometime I’ll talk more about the guy I live with’s main interest in life (besides me), music, and show his audio system.
But in the meantime, I want to talk about something else, and go back into our garden for that.
The guy I live with has this book, which he bought for his wife. He says it’s in some ways a “life-altering” book.
Some principles espoused in the book were incorporated into the way our house is laid out, like “Sleeping to the East”, among others.
The guy I live with, especially, is really into patterns, and the way things are arranged. That could be a whole post in itself.
In the book, there’s a short chapter called “Zen View”.
A Buddhist monk lived high in the mountains, in a small stone house. Far, far in the distance was the ocean, visible and beautiful from the mountains. But it was not visible from the monk’s house itself, nor from the approach road to the house. However, in front of the house there stood a courtyard surrounded by a thick stone wall. As one came to the house, one passed through a gate into this court, and then diagonally across the court to the front door of the house. On the far side of the courtyard there was a slit in the wall, narrow and diagonal, cut through the thickness of the wall. As a person walked across the court, at one spot, where his position lined up with the slit in the wall, for an instant, he could see the ocean. …
The view of the distant sea is so restrained that it stays alive forever.
(The guy I live with said that this book is out of print, and still kind of expensive, but it’s worth acquiring if you like stuff like this.)
You may ask what this has to do with gardening. Being the Designated Narrator, I’ll tell you.
But first of all, I should say that we live where we live. If the guy I live with had wanted something different, and of course sometimes he does, he would have moved shortly after his wife died. But remember the music part, and the fact that we’re here, and not some place else.
Since this has turned out to be one of those winters where the snow lingers in the garden for what seems like forever, we have to be content with our Zen view of plants in flower in the garden, and right now that means just snowdrops.
Yes, the pots are kind of ugly, but you can’t see the pond baskets with some of the snowdrops. I hear that this year everything will be redone, and all the fancy snowdrops will be planted in pond baskets.
This is ‘Chequers’.
This is Galanthus plicatus, but there’s no label, so the guy I live with isn’t totally sure if this is a named variety or not.
This is Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’. The guy I live with acquired this from Brent and Becky’s (maybe), though this is “kind of ordinary”, it’s been doing very well planted along the edge of the path.
So, yes, a lot of these are later than they typically would be, and it’s supposed to snow again this coming weekend, but the guy I live with said the snowdrops give us the gardening equivalent of a “Zen view” of what is, and what could be happening here, and that’s good enough for him, considering the uncooperative weather.
And that’s all I have for today. I was left alone for a while, but the guy I live with brought me back some stuff from the store, and I do realize, even though I rarely say it, that I’m very fortunate that he spends so much time at home with me.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Yucca pallida is cool! This is the first I heard of anyone else growing it. I know that there must be others growing it out there because they buy the seed from those who supply the seed, but I have never heard from any of them actually growing it.
The guy I live with said there was a plant here, a while ago, but he gave it to the neighbors, for some reason.
Probably because it was cool, and sharing is nice.
The guy I live with says that sharing is nice. Whether or not the people take care of the plant, or whatever. The yucca at the neighbors’ house looks really good.
People share with me all the time. That is how I got my Gladiolus papilio, beautyberry, American holly, white butterfly ginger, at least two watsonia and so on.
That sounds very nice.
Yes, winter drags on here also.
It is very much dragging on, here. The guy I live with said snow lying on the ground for weeks on end was never much of a feature of winters years ago, but apparently it is now.
And parts of the garden have become shadier in the winter, too.
But the snowdrops do make it all better. The guy I live with said he’s going to move more of them to places where there’s no snow and lots of sun in the winter.
I am really and truly tired of the wet conditions here.
Ordinarily there would be crocuses and stuff flowering here, but they’re all under snow.
Some snow melted today, but more is on the way, but then next week we’re back to our average daytime temperatures, around 12C.
I would rather be out in the garden with the guy I live with, but he says it’s too muddy in the few places where there isn’t snow.
Similarly here, I feel there are so many little, and big, jobs that I would like to be getting on with but it is simply impossible at the moment.
Well one job that the guy I live with says needs to be done “pretty soon” is spreading gravel on the dirt path out to the shed. Because right now it’s not hard-packed dirt…
Sorry to hear about losing thirty-year-old shrubs. What might replace them?
The little yuccas are lovely.
The guy I live with said he’s just “catastrophizing”, but if stuff gets dug up, it won’t be replaced.
February is a tough month. The days are getting longer and there are some warm days so of course, everyone wants to get out. Alas, winter isn’t quite finished. Probably why we always start way more seeds, and way earlier, than we need. Snowdrops, have to count our blessings.
The guy I live with said that, here, late winter and spring are a series of promises and disappointments, because it gets warmer and warmer, and then the next day it snows.
At least that’s the way it used to be. Winters now don’t seem to have as many warm days as they used to, but he claims to be resigned to this.
The solution, at least here, is to move more snowdrops from the shade garden (and there are a lot of them) into parts of the garden that have sun now. I mean instead of the constant complaining I have to endure.
Patterns, patterns, patterns, life is just patterns upon interconnecting patterns. I don’t know if it is the way my brain is set up or if it is my training as a scientist, maybe both, but sometimes I see so many patterns come together at once that it becomes paralyzing. It can be thrilling too, because suddenly something I’ve been puzzling over becomes crystal clear. The paralyzing part is just seeing how complicated and interconnected all of these patterns are – I can just glimpse the complexity behind everything and all the data is beyond what my brain can handle at once, so I end up shutting down. I wish I could upgrade my mental capacity and understand things further, but I can’t. Sounds sort of crazy, I suppose, but there you have it – what my brain does with patterns…
The guy I live with has responded to certain patterns for a very long time. The way things are arranged in a shop window, and so on. Random patterns in the garden. Structure in music. All of that.
I think maybe because years ago he read the novel Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, “a masterpiece of apophenia”.
Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, mentioned that writer in a post called “The Pole Garden”, which was possibly a very heavy-handed pun. (Gombrowicz was Polish.)