Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the somewhat damp purebred border collie, here today to tell you about the news of the last twenty-four hours. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Spring Stuff”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose, waiting for a biscuit.
You may be able to tell what happened here this morning.
It isn’t supposed to freeze tonight, so this is no big deal, according to the guy I live with.
Before I get to the news, which the snow is part of, I should show some of the plants that were in flower yesterday. They’re still in flower, but covered with snow now.
This is the lilac, ‘Annabel’. It’s the first lilac to flower here, and is rarely nipped by frost, unlike the common purple types.
The guy I live with has decided not to remove all the lilacs; he said it would be too much work.
This is Fritillaria pallidiflora:
This is Fritillaria oliveri. You can see progeny at the base of the plant behind it.
Cyclamen pseudibericum flowers later than the other cyclamen here.
Okay, so now I have a little story to tell. This involves me, so there will be added interest.
Way back when, the guy I live with and his wife used to have this agreement, that if they saw something special that one of them wanted, they should buy it. Like a book or a CD or a Christmas ornament. Not to mention purebred border collie puppies.
After his wife died, he made a last visit to Jerry Morris’s nursery. He bought some conifers, and noticed a little row of maybe four dwarf intermountain bristlecone pines, Pinus longaeva.
These are fairly similar to the bristlecone that’s from the mountains here, Pinus aristata, but don’t have the “leaky needles” as Jerry described them. (I’ve showed a picture of the dwarf Colorado bristlecone that he got from Jerry.) The needles do have some resin “leaking” from them, but not as much as the bristlecone of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona; both species grow in subalpine and alpine regions.
For some reason, the guy I live with didn’t get any of these little pines, grafted from witches’ brooms.
He has regretted this ever since then.
Yesterday there was a big plant sale at the county fairgrounds. The guy I live with told me he wouldn’t stay very long, and would try not to buy very many plants.
The forecast, believe it or not, called for rain. The sale took place in the evening.
The guy I live with rarely leaves me alone in the evening, and so he gave me some Rescue Remedy on a biscuit, just in case.
He wasn’t at the plant sale for very long. After the landmine business, he had signed up for alerts from the county, and his phone went off as he was driving home. There was lots of thunder and lightning.
When he stopped at a red light, he looked at his phone, and there was a severe thunderstorm warning, right where he was sitting in his car.
It started to hail on our new car. Fortunately the hail was only pea-sized, and he was less than twenty blocks from home.
When he got home, he saw that it had hailed here, and apologized profusely for abandoning me. I was okay, but decided to play it pretty pathetically.
Eventually he brought out the plants he bought; conifers propagated by Laporte Avenue Nursery. They propagate several of Jerry’s conifers, mostly named varieties, but at least one that isn’t named.
There’s a Pinus flexilis ‘Saunny’, named after Jerry Morris’s wife, and two dwarf Pinus longaeva. The guy I live with said he thought Jerry never gave these a name. Even if these aren’t the same as the ones he saw at the nursery, all those years ago, they’re good enough.
I could tell he was very happy with these pines. He said he was going to “coddle the daylights out of them”.
The pines can live happily in pots; their roots can tolerate a great deal of cold. (The roots of Pinus flexilis, for instance, are hardy down to -79F, -61.6C, so living in pots here isn’t an issue at all. The guy I live with said he can’t imagine cold like that.)
And that’s our little story.
This morning, the guy I live with was a bit concerned that I might not want to go on my morning walk, considering the possibility of thunder, but by the time we were ready for our walk, it was snowing. It can still thunder when it snows, but it didn’t, this time.
(The snow has mostly melted now, and it’s just raining.)
Water in the creek was flowing really fast. Maybe all the sand will have been washed down the creek after all of this.
I’ll let you go now, with some pictures of the creek, and best of all, pictures of me.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Those pines look beautiful. I killed a Bristlecone once, and it was so awful, I am scared to try it again. Still not sure what I did. But I am sure the guy you live with will have better luck!
I am growing ‘Blue Jazz’ pinyon pine now, though, and no fatalities so far.
The guy I live with got his ‘Blue Jazz’ directly from Jerry, before it was introduced into cultivation. The plant is kind of leaning now, after the big snow in March, which makes him not hugely happy.
He did manage to kill a few of the things he got from Jerry, which is typical for gardening.
The dwarf bristlecone he got from Jerry isn’t all that dwarf now, and has required some pruning. It isn’t a named variety.
You may rightly wonder about the “Jerry this, Jerry that”. It’s because his dwarf conifers do vastly better here than selections from Europe.
(By the way, we’re not sure why your comment went to moderation. The email and IP address look the same as other ones from you. The guy I live with said it must just be weirdness, which is going around a lot.)
I have had some issues with WordPress—a novice with it—so it was likely something on my end. Hopefully solved now.
The guy I live with said he didn’t think so.
If the name, email address and IP address are the same as previously-approved comments, then the comment just flows through.
Including a link will cause a comment to go to moderation.
But sometimes WordPress gets cranky, like everything else related to computers.
A few additions to the garden are always welcome!
Yes, especially when they have some special meaning. The guy I live with said it was an arbitrary meaning that no one else would understand unless he explained it to them, but that that’s how most things are, anyway.
And now he has to go shopping for some more blue glazed pots.
That’s a whole subject in itself.
Pinus laevigata is the species that I wanted to try, although I doubt it would be happy at home. Are cultivars of it used for landscaping? I thought that I saw it in landscapes near Flagstaff, but I did not investigate to identify it. There were quite a few small pines there that I did not recognize.
Do you mean Pinus longaeva? The guy I live with says that probably not in cultivation, and only in botanic gardens.
It’s probably P. aristata that you saw. That’s fairly common in the trade.
By the way, the two pines he bought turned out not to be dwarf, but seedlings, so they’ll grow pretty big, in a thousand years.
What the heck?! Where did I get that name? Yes, I meant the bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva. Now that you mention it, someone in Oklahoma also suggested that the small pines that I saw were likely Pinus arista. Their description, including their darker foliar color, matches, but I really can not confirm their identity. A thousand dog years is almost 143 human years, which is still a very long time. A thousand human years is much longer in dog years!
They’re almost certainly Pinus aristata, which is propagated commercially.
Mee-yow Mani an Guy youss’ have had rollycoastur weather fore sure! Wee loved yore Flowerss from last post….sorry wee were too late to commint! THE Irisess are BellaSita’ss fave flowerss….
THE Bristlecone Piness are so kewl Mistur Guy…..wee happy you gotted them. An Mani wee glad you Okay aftur THE storm!!! Bee carefull~~~THE creek sure got full quiklee! ***nose bopss*** BellaDharma an (((hugss))) BellaSita Mum
Yes, we got quite a lot of rain, and some snow, too.
A lot of the sand was washed farther down the creek, but not all of it.
It rained a little bit yesterday evening, too.
Comments for older posts are turned off because otherwise we get a bunch of spam, which the guy I live wit has to spend time deleting.