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 today to bring you up to date on all the excitement here. You may remember me from such posts as “Going With The Flow”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Checking out things on the ground, as usual. It’s very rewarding to look closely at things, if you didn’t know.
This is what I do; I look at things. The guy I live with said humans spend a lot of time thinking about abstract things, but I just look, and occasionally sniff. You can learn a lot by looking, and sniffing.
Here, I’m looking at the fallen flowers of the cottonwoods just out of the picture, on the left.
They kind of look like reddish caterpillars, if you ask me. I’ve seen real caterpillars. They’re creepy.
So I walked through the fallen flowers.
A bit farther to the east, the canal, which you can see on the right, makes a turn, and so we walked that way, and the wild plums (Prunus americana) were in full flower.
The guy I live with says the scent tells him it’s spring, and he also said you (I don’t know who he meant by “you”) can make a nice jam or jelly from them.
Some years these shrubs are covered with plums, but the coyotes usually eat all of them. Maybe birds eat them too.
Our weather has been…unusual. One day we have “fire weather” warnings, and the next, we get rain and snow.
We had almost a quarter inch of rain a couple of days ago (actually at night, which is very unusual), and this coming Thursday there’s another “fire weather” warning, but the guy I live with said maybe that wasn’t for us, exactly.
Things are happening in the garden. One of the manzanitas (this is a low-growing one in the front yard) is flowering.
This picture isn’t in focus, but the guy I live with said to pretend that it is.
The native bluebells, Mertensia lanceolata, are flowering, too:
The juno irises are flowering.
The guy I live with thinks this is Iris vicaria:
This is Iris warleyensis:
And this is Iris aucheri ‘Indigo’:
The guy I live with said this could also be one called ‘Olof’, but he buried the labels so deeply he would have to dig up the whole plant to find the exact name.
Some time around the beginning of last winter he sowed a bunch of seeds of Fritillaria pallidiflora which he had collected from plants in the garden. He just sprinkled the seeds on the ground, and a couple of weeks ago he noticed this:
He said something like “Everything should be this easy to grow from seeds.”
They grow this for medicinal purposes in China and the guy I live with said he’s seen pictures of whole fields of this fritillaria being grown for that purpose.
I’ll show pictures of the other plants in flower in another post.
And of course, throughout all of this, the guy I live with has been painting. He finished the upstairs bedroom, which isn’t used as a bedroom but just has a bunch of the guy I live with’s stuff in it.
There are some things about this room that are beyond my understanding.
That door leads to a small closet which was converted to a computer room where the guy I live with wrote books. He rarely goes in there now.
You can see a map, which is a map of New England, just to the right and above the little can of pipe cleaners (the guy I live with used to smoke a pipe), which his grandfather hand-colored and which the guy I live with has known all his life. Or at least since he was about five years old, so for over sixty-eight years. That’s a long time.
It isn’t worth anything, except for him knowing this for so long. There are some other things like that in this room.
He’s had the little bust of Beethoven (in the bookcase) since he was about fourteen.
I get the impression that painting this room was a huge amount of work.
I hear that our bedroom will be next.
He wasn’t going to paint our bedroom, but he’s been watching “The Residence” on Netflix, which he really likes, to the point of watching it over and over again, and he was struck by the painted walls, so now I’m in for more of this.
It’s very boring to watch someone paint, but our forecast calls for rain, rain, fire weather, rain, snow, rain, snow, and so on, and I know that he gets a lot of pleasure from painting, very stress-relieving (except for the time he spilled paint on the carpet upstairs).
Look what he has to deal with. His wife put this strip at the top of the walls, and you can see that the last time the guy I live with didn’t get any paint on the strip. He thinks his aging, arthritic hands are still steady enough not to get paint on the strip (and he’s using something called “Frog Tape” to mask the strip, but still…).
All very boring, I know.
Fortunately our bedroom is a very small room so there won’t be a lot of moving of things and groaning in pain and stuff like that. At least I hope not.
So that’s all I have for today. I hope I didn’t bore the daylights out of you.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me not looking at the ducks in the canal, but they’re right there. The guy I live with said these are male and female mallards, and the way things go, we can expect ducklings in a couple of months. The ducklings are pretty cute.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
California, Nevada and Louisiana are the only three states that American plum is not native to. However, it seems to be naturalized from understock from old orchard trees. I can find no documentation of this, so I sort of wonder about its identity. I should know more about the orchards that I grew up with. I actually purchased seed for American plum just to be certain of its identity, rather than collect it from a naturalized source. I know that sounds like overkill, but I really can not identify the species, or distinguish it from some of the other naturalized understock.
The guy I live with says the 15 feet mentioned in the Wikipedia article must be from places farther east, because here it only gets about 8 feet tall.
We had some shrubs here but they got black knot disease and died.
The trees here that I believe to be American plum grow about fifteen feet tall. Some seem to be Chickasaw plum, but like the American plum, I never bothered to identify them.
The guy I live with says there’s a treatment of the genus Prunus in Flora of North America, online.
Ah, black knot disease! So that’s what it is. The wild plums here seem to have outbreaks of that that more years than “knot”. Last year was an exception, a bumper crop of fruit on the little copse below my house. Up here on Lookout they are not blooming yet. I have a few volunteers on the edge of my property that I’m excited about. P.s. Mani tell your guy that the blue room looks fantastic! Such a soothing color.
He says thanks.
Chokecherries often get black knot, though maybe it’s not a big deal for them. There are chokecherries everywhere in the garden, no doubt from birds pooping out the seeds.
One or two years ago the wild plums got some weird fungus or something and there was no fruit at all. The snow tomorrow may possible spoil the chances for a big plum crop this year, but the guy I live with said the snow is a fair trade.
No, Mani, you didn’t bore me. It’s pleasant to see people (and dogs) accomplishing things. As for me, I am playing around with pipe cleaners, trying to twist them into interesting shapes and stuff. I don’t know that it will accomplish anything or not. We shall see.
Until later all the best.
It was surprising to see the guy I live with accomplishing something. The only trouble is now he can’t stop.
He left me alone today to get more paint.
He also said that he had a cat who liked to play with pipe cleaners. The cat would actually fetch them when the pipe cleaners were curled into a spiral and tossed across the room.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will have to try that with my next cat.
I don’t think I ever remember a picture of the plums before. Very nice to see them in full bloom. I’d be tempted to sit there all day and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. Your Iris warleyensis is very eye catching. I wish you could transmit some of the scents through your blog. Of course, you know that the human sense of smell is abysmally low. It’s a wonder that we can make our way through life at all knowing that we are missing so much right beneath our noses. I can only imagine the smelliferous wonders that you’ve encountered. Linnaeus, the cat that I live with, has a very sensitive sense of smell and is offended by the scent of coffee, oranges, catnip, … and so on. He’s the first cat I’ve lived with that doesn’t like catnip. It makes me wonder about his psychological state of mind. Of course, he wonders about mine as well. Glad to see a new post from you!
Thanks. The plums have a very sweet scent in flower.
I can smell way more than humans, and that’s one nice thing about going on walks. I’ve never smelled hard liquor, but years ago when the guy I live with drank scotch, he said the purebred border collies who lived here before me were repelled by it, but Slipper once drank a whole glass of red wine that was sitting on the table. This was before the guy I live with learned that alcohol was bad for dogs.
I don’t like the smell of snakes, for sure.
On a weather note, the guy I live with’s phone said “fire weather watch” this morning, but now it says “winter weather advisory”.
Springtime in the Rockies…always a changeable time of year. Today mid-70’sF, tomorrow low 30’s. I’m getting whiplash from this year’s spring.
The guy I live with said it’s often like this. He called his sister to tell his today was the anniversary of the family moving into the house in Littleton, in 1961, but when they arrived in Denver, maybe ten days earlier, there was snow on the ground. The guy I live with had never seen snow before.
Though it might spoil some plants, you won’t hear any complaints from us about the snow forecast for this weekend.
It was odd that Evergreen and Castle Rock has “fire weather” warnings today, but we didn’t. The guy I live with did remind me, and his neighbors, that we’ve had a lot more moisture than any other part of the Front Range, since the water year started in October.
These fire warnings are coming more often in Colorado. The fire season never seems to end. I recall a couple of recent Mother’s Days where the flowering spring bulbs were buried in 4 inches of snow.
The guy I live with said they probably issue those warnings because of the Marshall Fire, which freaked out everyone, though it was a highly unusual event in an extremely windy part of the Front Range.
This last warning wasn’t even for us, though. We’re in Fire Zone 239. (Denver is 240.) It was for Evergreen and Castle Rock, which is admittedly weird.
He also said that except for one day in May, May 1st, he doesn’t remember it snowing in May any time last century, but it has here every May this century except for maybe one or two.
Then there was a time when he worked at the Mother’s Day sale at DBG and most of the annuals were black after a frost (sad to look at), and yet nothing like that had happened here.
Mee-yow Mani those fallen flowerss DUE look like Catty-pillurss!! Weerd rite? All yore flowerss look so purrty. THE Irisess are BellaSita’ss faverite 😉 Shee iss gaga fore them…what efurr that meenss?? Hu’manss sure have funny werdss don’t they? Mistur Guy wee are happy yore paintin an deckoratin iss going well. Yore man cave is purrty kewl two! Happy Easter to you both
***nose rubss*** BellaDharma an ((hugss)) BellaSita Mum
Thanks; same to you.
I think “gaga” means “really enthusiatic”. I’ve never heard the guy I live with say that word, though I have heard him say other words, because the painting is a huge amount of work, moving furniture and stuff.
It snowed her yesterday and the day before. The guy I live with was pretty happy about that. All the snow is gone now.