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 give you just the bear facts, as well as talk about our garden, some. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cow-Pen Daisies”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Well right off, I’ve been listening to the guy I live with explain to me that he thinks his garden should exemplify a state of calm. He prefers not to have a lot of plants in flower during the summer, because he says having that’s a holdover from climates that have a lot of summer rain, and he prefers a drier look, which he thinks is calmer. He said this would be a very unpopular view if he advocated it, which he doesn’t. It’s just for him.
Grasses waving in the breeze can help assuage depression and anxiety, which the guy I live with has a lot of both.

One non-calm event has been slowly taking place here. The cutting down (but not removal) of two lilacs.
These lilacs came from The Green Spot nursery in Littleton, which the guy I live with thinks was originally the late George Kelly’s nursery when his Cottonwood Garden Shop was wiped out in the flood of June 1965. He could have his facts wrong. George Kelly was a pioneer when it came to growing native plants, but of course nurseries have to sell lilacs, too, to make customers happy.
The guy I live with and his wife visited that nursery just once.
You can see how bad the lilacs looked after this summer. Maybe they’re in a place where rain doesn’t reach at all. (The green is the New Mexican privet, which doesn’t care.)

The other non-calm thing has to do with Mahonia (now Alloberberis) fremontii.
It was covered in fruit a couple of weeks ago.
Now it looks like this.
I’ve noticed some highly unusual scents on the mahonia.
The guy I live with said that his neighbor across the street said she saw “the bear” in someone’s driveway a couple of days ago, so that explains it.
I don’t want to see the bear. I’ve seen a bear, and one was enough for me.

Now for some calmer things. The guy I live with took this picture and said “Safer with me than any creature on earth.”
He said that was from “Big Trouble in Little China”, a movie I’ve never seen.
As you can see, the bunny is very, very safe.
The bunnies live here; I don’t chase them. They do nibble on newly-planted plants, maybe to try them out, which is why you see cages in some pictures.

Now for a series of pictures which the guy I live with thinks illustrates the idea of calm in the garden. The white river rocks have been moved so the guy I live with can crawl under the privets to collect pea gravel. The fence will be removed, eventually, when plants adapted to sand are growing there, instead of fancy bulbs.

There’s an incipit (I’ve always wanted to use that word) of a path here. The path will be dirt. You can see the big metal chicken. 
A peep into the Employees Only section of the garden.
The red thing is a tomato, dropped by a squirrel.
The trough patio, with the ants.Eriogonum corymbosum.
Where the cyclamen live.
That brings me to the end of today’s post. I will definitely let everyone know if I have the misfortune to see a bear again.
I prefer calmer things, thank you very much.

Until next time, then.