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 our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “An Autumn Afternoon”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Right now, it’s very dry here and doesn’t feel at all like autumn. The guy I live worries that it may never rain again, and that this coming winter will just be hot, dry, and windy, like last winter, so, along with all the new plants he’s put in, he’s started a project of raising woody plants that may tolerate the endless heat and dryness, instead of talking about how to water plants during this drought. In other words, he’s trying to keep up with our climate, which has changed so much since he moved here sixty-some years ago that he says it’s almost unrecognizable.
He said he got sidetracked, for some reason, getting into growing a lot of bulbs instead of putting in plants that would tolerate all this dryness, but now he claims to be “back on track” and ordering seeds of dryland shrubs at age seventy-five.
Here are some seedlings of Vachellia (Acacia) constricta.
We showed pictures of some seedlings of this a while ago, but all the seedlings died. This time, which is the third time he’s tried these, he’s being very careful about making sure the pots get watered.

The guy I live with says the number of plants that have died here over the years is “staggering” (and that includes a lot of the bulbs he ordered over the last several years), so today he was really surprised to see that the “grape bush” (Vitis acerifolia) was still alive. Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, wrote about the grape bush.
This makes a bush, not a vine, which is why it’s called a grape bush and not a grapevine. The things you learn, huh? He says you can’t hear anything on it, which I didn’t understand.
It’s native to the region around the two “panhandles”, Oklahoma and Texas, and also southeastern Colorado, northeastern New Mexico, and southwestern Kansas, so it’s pretty obvious why it’s still here.

As usual, more work has been done in the garden. I’m sure you’ll find a great deal of beauty in this new planting.
This is bluebunch wheatgrass, Pseudoroegneria spicata, a cool-season native grass, and the guy I live with assured me these would look better in a month or so. The grass was dug up and divided when the path was widened.
I watched him prepare this bed, which was a “problem area”. (It kind of looks like it still is.)
Supervising can be exhausting, as you can see.

As I said, it doesn’t feel very much like autumn here. The first autumn crocus, Crocus speciosus, came into flower yesterday.
He said this is very clearly virused (the white parts), which he said might be a metaphor, so he tried to dig it up today but the self-sown corm was buried so deeply he couldn’t get to it, which he said was probably another metaphor.

It is technically autumn, even though some wet weather would make it feel more like autumn, and some leaves have turned despite the dryness.
This is Acer grandidentatum:
And the native sumac, Rhus trilobata. These very large shrubs haven’t been watered in thirty-five years.
And Ribes aureum, which is all over the garden here. (That’s a lilac behind it, which the guy I live with has been trying to remove for some years.)
Now that the leaves are falling, we can see all the nests here. This is just one.
Okay, that’s the gardening stuff, on what feels more like a summer day than a pleasantly cool and damp afternoon in October.
The guy I live with’s wife’s birthday was a couple of days ago, and he pretended (or so it seemed to me) that everything was fine. This was her favorite time of year, because it was all autumnal and stuff, not hot and bone-dry, and her favorite holiday was Halloween.
Speaking of which, and trying not to speak of our new residents, I learned to my horror that there are more than three of these terrifying things. Judging from what everyone we met on our walks has said, there could be a hundred, as I initially feared.
I wonder what Halloween night will be like. I don’t want to see anything ursine running around because of the smell of candy.
I’m staying inside, and only going on walks when the sun is shining. Where I am in this picture is supposedly where these creatures sleep in trees, during the day, so it’s “safe”.

Until next time, then.