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 our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Yellow Pigs”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Here I am in another characteristic pose.
You can see how green it is here. It rained about a hundred drops today. The guy I live with said it might have been 101 drops.
There were garden tours last Saturday, but the guy I live with said the last garden he visited on Saturday the 23rd of May, seventeen years ago, his life changed forever the next day.
He did okay yesterday, on the anniversary of his wife’s death, though I knew he was sad.
The guy I live with has been posting pictures of native shrubs that need no supplemental irrigation on Facebook because of all this talk about what to do with the current watering restrictions here in Denver.
This is Alloberberis haematocarpa.
It used to be a mahonia, then a berberis, now it’s an alloberberis. I think it probably doesn’t care. It has juicy, red, supposedly edible fruit later in the year.
The guy I live with took about a hundred pictures of Acanthus hirsutus and wasn’t really happy with any of them, but I think this one is excellent.
And he took a picture of Echium russicum since the plants are coming into flower now. This seeds around a bit.
And a picture looking down the path on the north side of the garden. You can see a hose snaking down the path, but the hose isn’t even hooked up to the faucet.
The guy I live with has been pretty irritable lately. I can tell. There’s a “disgusting” smell all over our front and back yards, and in every room in our house.
He’s complained about this before, and wonders why everything has to have some sort of “fragrance”.
I forget if I said that the guy I live with bought one of those plastic fences to protect the snowdrops when the new gas meter was installed and even the fence was scented.
Out of curiosity, the guy I live with bought some “No. 4711 echt kölnisch Wasser”, the original cologne. He said no one would notice it on him, and that’s how it should be.
He also said he may be turning into a cranky old man but there’s no reason for people and things to reek.
(He said to put in all this stuff about fragrance. I have a better nose and I notice it too, but don’t complain so much.)
Anyway, after all that, it’s time to talk about the melons.
He got these from Native Seeds/SEARCH and got 100 percent germination. He got four kinds, and has given away a dozen pots already.
He thought maybe some melons from the Southwest might do better here, but really he has no experience at all growing melons. Believe it or not.
He said that not many things are as exciting to gardeners as seeing vines trailing on the ground; he tried several times to grow the native, non-edible Cucurbita foetidissima, but the plants always failed for some reason. That plant makes a spectacular vine, covering the ground.
The guy I live with said if we have a really hot summer maybe these melons will produce fruit. He also said I would get to try some. Purebred border collies like melons; the guy I live with’s wife wanted to call our house Melon Collie Manor.
So I guess we’ll see.
Back to some greenery for a moment. This is the path in the green belt behind our house (you can’t see our house, which is about halfway down the path). The creek is on the right.
This is the path to the canal road, though we’re coming from the canal road, so in this case it’s the path home. Funny how that changes. I almost always get to decide which way to walk, and this is the usual way, the one that I like the best.
Sometimes there are voles along the canal bank, and I like to check out where they live.
The grass, to the right of where I’m standing looking at things, mostly died last year or the year before, but it does get walked on a lot. I think all these little plants are lamb’s quarters, Chenopodium album,which is a native plant. (When the guy I live with mentioned lambs I got all interested for a moment).
The canal is on the left, here, if you couldn’t tell.
That’s all I have for today. Kind of a lot, maybe.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
These “dry” plants look especially lush and beautiful. I wonder if they emit a pleasant fragrance?
Well the only plant that really enjoys the dryness is the mahonia. He still calls it that.
The guy I live with says it’s hard to tell if it has a scent because all he can smell is that “home fragrance” from next door, but the mahonia out in front, Mahonia fremontii, smells sort of like chocolate.
Well, there are lots of interesting things you have written about here that I could ask about or comment on, but the idea of a scented fence has kind of thrown me. So I will just ask, in your first Characteristic Pose photo, what are the plants in the two big black pots on the right? Those look like handsome shrubs of some sort.
Scented fence, scented trash bags, and the smell that’s now all over everywhere here.
Those plants in the pots are Chamaebatiaria millefolium, the fernbush.
There was a big plant in the front yard here but it was smashed to pieces in the hailstorm of 1991. Ever sence then the guy I live with has purchased plants which constantly failed for one reason or another, but, of course, he planted a very small plant in the little garden across the street, years ago, and it’s doing very well.
These have been repotted so their roots will grow out of the nursery root ball before they get planted.
Oh, I love fernbush! (Now those smell wonderful, as opposed to the odors coming from next door.) Those are so nicely shaped. Mine is just a tiny thing at the moment.
I am glad to hear that the guy you live with did okay, the day before yesterday.
Thanks; the day wasn’t too bad, and the smell wasn’t too strong, unlike yesterday and this morning.
The smell of fernbush is wonderful. The guy I live with says it smells like labdanum, which they use in the nice scent, amber.
A long time ago there were plants of Cistus ladanifer (where the resin comes from for labdanum), and when you opened the door to the alpine house that wonderful scent filled the little house.
We can’t grow that cistus here, though it would have been fine all the last winter.
Scent coming from a house? I have never been so glad to have a dwindling sense of smell, before. p.s. I think that weedy patch might be alyssum or kochia, instead of chenopodium? Hard to tell.
Yes, “home fragrance”. It’s sickeningly strong, and the guy I live with might lose his mind because of it and I’ll have to carry on the blog all by myself. (It will all be about me, then.)
The guy I live with doesn’t know his weeds very well but he does think these are the ones that get those reddish purple spots on the leaves. If they’re lamb’s quarters they’re not really weeds. It would be weird to have native plants in the green belt and other disturbed areas though. There are five or six native plant species around here, besides the willows.
I too am trying to grow melon for the first time this year! I had a “Hopi Origin Titus Melon” start grown from Vibrant Earth Seeds (Cortez CO) which was powering along and thriving in the full sun and hot weather we were having earlier this month until that heavy rain soaking – it promptly died! So now I need a new melon. What kinds are you growing?
I am also trying to grow for the first time the “Buffalo Gourd” Cucurbita foetidissima that I got at the DBG plant sale, and am super excited about the foliage. I must admit that I am a bit intimidated to learn that it hasn’t been successful at your place – is it finicky?
The guy I live with has no idea why the buffalo gourds keep failing here. Maybe rabbits ate the young plants.
You can see them all along the roadside on I-25 south of Colorado Springs. Big patches of silvery-gray leaves.
He still hasn’t planted the melons, but he got ‘Chimayo’, ‘Esperanza de Oro’, ‘San Felipe’, and ‘Black Mesa’. They were just the ones he picked; all said from “high elevation”.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge about native shrubs, even if it is more on FB than here recently. I’ve been trying to research good shrubs for a property-line hedge, and I am finding it hard, so your posts here are really helpful.
You’re welcome. The guy I live with says if you look at that down-the-path picture, the shrubs on the right are Forestiera pubescens (aka F. neomexicana), the New Mexican privet. They’ve been there for over thirty-five years and don’t get watered.
They have seeded around in the garden a bit, in the last several years (one of the original plants is a female).
No autumn color though.
Three-leaf sumac, Rhus trilobata, is another good choice, if you don’t mind the “sumac smell” when you brush against them.
There are a bunch of those here, equally old, and never watered.
He bought all these for $6.25 each. Times have changed.
Mee-yow that was a compree-hensive post Mani!! Wee happy all iss green there! That THE flowerss are flowering. That you look hansum!
Wee are sad about THE smellss. Wee two do not like all this stinky stuff.. BellaSita was buyin mee Tidy Catss Glade litter. It smelled litely like sweet apple. It was ackshully nice. Shee bought a new jug an it smelled PAWFULL!!! Like a Men’ss co-lone gone rotten! Shee ackshully emptied THE littrbox an washed box an put inn unscentd litter. MUCH bettur! Wee wunder why a fence wuud have to bee scented? That iss furry weerd rite Mani an Guy???
Enjoy those 101 Raindropss!
***nose rubss*** BellaDharma an **waves** BellaSita Mum
Thanks. It rained a little on my morning walk but I guess that’s all for today.
It’s very weird that things have to be scented. The plastic fence is like one of those lattice-like fences they put around things like holes and stuff to keep people from walking there, and they’re usually bright orange.
The fence reeks. He got some trash bags once that smelled so bad we couldn’t have the back door open. The guy I live with gave them to a neighbor who didn’t mind the smell.
The guy I live with also said he might hire a private investigator to locate the source of the smell. That sounded pretty unrealistic to me.
Wee thinkss Guy’s idea mite bee guud…Okay it ISS a bit ‘out there’ Mani; butt THE odorss REELLY bother sum peepss an sum 4-leggedss two. Wee nose THE type of fencin you meen…BellaSita said it nevurr used to smell like that…Imma like “You a fence sniffer BellaSita?” Shee blushed an did not reeply! 😉
The guy I live with said “Can you imagine, twenty years ago, going into a hardware place and asking if they carried perfumed fences or trash bags?”