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 possibly less-than-exciting events in our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “My New Toy”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Looking at the greenness, you wouldn’t know how dry it is here, but let me tell you, it’s really dry. We’ve had about an inch (2.5cm) of rain since the first of July.
The guy I live with said if I looked back at blog posts done at this time of year there would be complaining about how dry it was and how it might never rain again, and you would think he would have become accustomed to this, but he says this drought is “anxiety-inducing”, and I happen to know that’s a subject he knows a lot about.
He also knows a lot about being irritated, and one especially irritating thing for him was the discovery that NOAA said this was the “third wettest August” in Denver history. He had no idea why they said that, because that’s not reflected on the CoCoRaHS database, but it turns out that these measurements were taken at the airport, which is thirty-three miles (53km) east of here.
It rains more out there. We got more snow and rain than “out there” up until June, but now the situation is reversed.
So the guy I live with has been watering, with some positive results.
Salvia darcyi is finally starting to flower, and maybe the last of the hummingbirds will notice it.
The guy I live with says this salvia is about as drought-tolerant as a tomato plant, but he still likes it a lot. He planted five plants in the front garden, which was a mistake, considering how wilty they get when the soil is dry.
The amount of water needed to keep those leaves turgid is considerable, though of course not if it gets the amount of rain it gets in its native habitat, 3.26 inches (82.9mm) in September, and since it grows in rocky soil in real life, all that rain goes right to the roots.
This is ‘Windwalker’ again, which is a cross between darcyi and Salvia greggii. (The latter is much more tolerant of dry soil, but won’t flower in late summer if it doesn’t rain or get irrigation.)
You can see the leaves are smaller, so less hydration is needed, but it still needed watering to get it to flower.
In other news, the first cyclamen are flowering. These are Cyclamen hederifolium; they flower without leaves, at first. This is called hysteranthy.
(I thought showing a picture of this growing with Hedera helix was a bit heavy-handed. The ivy is a cultivar called ‘Baltica’.)
Cyclamen purpurascens is flowering, too. This flowers with the leaves emerging at the same time; this is called synanthy.
This is a selection called ‘Extra Fancy’, because of the leaves.
In rainier climates this species will have green leaves all summer, but not here.
And there are some colchicums. These are all hysteranthous; the leaves appear in the spring.
This is Colchicum autumnale ‘Nancy Lindsay’.
The guy I live with got this as Colchicum atropurpureum ‘Drake’s Variety’, but there’s no such thing, and he thinks this looks more like one called ‘Disraeli’.
That cultivar is known for its tesselation, or a sort of checkerboard pattern, which you can see.
And Colchicum kotschyi, from Iran.
Rest assured there will be more pictures of colchicums in future posts. There are a lot of colchicums in our garden, and I do mean a lot.
I’m pretty sure that’s all I have for today. I suspect I’m going to have to listen to a lot of complaints about the lack of rain, especially when rain is predicted and never arrives, which happens a lot, but I’ll manage.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Good to see the colchicums appearing – same here! However, we have had generous amounts of rain.
The guy I live with says it’s strange that colchicums appear at roughly the same time all over the Northern Hemisphere, no matter what the weather.
More appeared today.
I ordered a few from Holland today.
We’re lucky to have a couple of mail-order nurseries that offer a fairly wide variety of colchicums. Mostly named varieties.
There was a specialty mail-order nursery that offered quite a few, too, but no longer.
Typically I would complain about the lack of rain, but since my garden got 1.35” in August, it would be unseemly. That’s still a half-inch shy of NOAA’s “normal” for the month, but it was enough to get the Red Rocks penstemon to rebloom (delightful). I did replace a young, struggling Autumn Brilliance serviceberry tree, which I’d planted before fully comprehending the writing on the water wall, and replaced it with a Yucca thompsoniana. My garden is drifting toward something like a northern New Mexico garden now, which is okay by me.
The guy I live with says that’s a nice yucca. We don’t grow it.
The endless dry weather here is getting to him (I can tell) though in truth this is nothing new. We’ve had years with no precipitation at all after mid-July; all that started this century.
Gardening along the Front Range is not for the faint of heart and September is the time of year when I’m so exhausted from having to do so much supplemental watering. I’ve noticed I’m not overly heartbroken when something doesn’t flower. Sigh.
The guy I live with would agree, though with all the hummingbirds here this year he said he’s going to commit to more watering, and more plants for the hummingbirds, because they’ll remember our open bar for nectar.
He remembers the four inches of snow here on the third of September, 1961, and wouldn’t mind a repeat of that.
Mee-yow still NO rain Mani?? Wee have two much…wish wee cuud send it to youss’! Deespite beein dry; yore flowerss are lovelee! **nose bopss** BellaDharma an ((hugss)) BellaSita Mum
Still no rain. The guy I live with’s sister called him and asked if he’d gotten rain like she did. She doesn’t live all that far away.
Everyone is getting rain except us. I mean we have gotten rain, about three-quarters of an inch last month (the average for August is two inches), but in increments so small it hardly matters. Like a millimeter or two every day.
We’re really feeling left out, right now.
An wee felin drenched alot of THE time Mani!! It’ss like youss’ have a dome over you or are innvisible!
Probably both, huh.
YIKESS Mani an Guy! Wee hope not….
The guy I live with went out today, and when he came back he stopped at the hardware store twenty blocks south of here.
He said it was really raining there.
When he got to our neighborhood, the streets were dry.
Mani that iss sorta weerd an creepy!!! Did you’ss get rain yet?
It is. We got a little rain just now.
HURRAH!!! Wee do a rain dance so youss’ get more Mani 😉
Thanks. We could certainly use more rain.