the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on all the news, after kind of a long absence. You may remember me from such posts as “The Tour Guide”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s been really hot and ickily humid (for us; most people wouldn’t notice it); the guy I live with has been working out in the garden, but not constantly, because of the heat.
He said there hasn’t been much of anything going on worthy of a post, and maybe there still isn’t.

Just today he did some work in the front yard. He said the mahonia, which was sown by a bird ages ago, needed to go because its leaves were “too glossy green” for the front yard, so he dug it up. Some rooted branches were saved and are in pots next to the patio.

He went over to a nursery yesterday to get a couple more Hesperaloe campanulata. You can see one of the new ones on the left, behind the Yucca schottii. The other new one is behind the existing one and I guess you can’t really see it.
It’s much different from the usual Hesperaloe parviflora you see everywhere here; the guy I live with tried to take new pictures of the flowers today, but they were closed, because it’s been sprinkling on and off.
Here’s the picture of the flowers he posted on Facebook the other day.
The Colorado four o’clock, Mirabilis multiflora, is flowering too, in the front yard. (The plant actually sprawls onto the driveway.)
And there are tiny acorns on Quercus undulata, also in the front yard.

The garden in back looks pretty good after the rain we had at the beginning of June.
That bunch of Aster oblongifolius to the right of me is going to go; the guy I live with says it’s “too green”. I guess he means too much uninterrupted green. There are dozens of other plants of it in the garden anyway. It seeds everywhere.
It’s on the left, in the picture below.
The Salvia sclarea var. turkestanica has also seeded all over the garden, and is really starting to flower now.
Speaking of flowering, the buffalo grass in my Private Lawn is flowering, too.
The hose is there because one part started to dry out for some reason. Buffalo grass really doesn’t need much water, though it does need some.
The guy I live with said he might not mow it this year. If it gets mowed, then it needs to be watered.

Oh, the title of my post. The guy I live with posted a picture of the rose, ‘Darlow’s Enigma’, on Facebook (this is a different picture), and also said something about the haiku.
The guy I live with’s wife carved the haiku into the wood. She was really into haiku. One time a nurseryman friend said he would trade haiku for some plants that were really hard to get, so she wrote some haiku and they got some plants.

There was a garden tour once where one person insisted on stopping and reading each haiku aloud to everyone else, even though they all wanted to move on to another part of the garden.
Kind of like going to the checkout line at the grocery store and asking if something is in stock, rather than going to the customer service desk, and holding up everyone else in line.
Or like shooting off fireworks at this time of year. They’re illegal, but people do it anyway.
The guy I live with says people can be self-centered at times.
But now when he stops to look at the haiku he doesn’t just think of how happy his wife was, building the pergola and carving the haiku with a Dremel tool, he also thinks of that unpleasant incident.
And when he thinks of the Fourth of July, he thinks of frightened purebred border collies, and has for over thirty years.

The guy I live with also got the new license plates for our car. He said it was a relief, because it felt strange driving around with temporary plates for so long. Not that he goes to very many places.
He says it’s a bit different, but nice, to have a car that says “See you” when he gets out of the car after parking it in the garage.

I guess that’s all. I’ll leave you with a picture of me in a very relaxed state.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you that once again, I’m roasting hot. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Still Roasting”, “Beyond Super Roasting”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see how green it is after the rain two weeks ago. It rained today, for about ten seconds.
It’s pretty hot. It was 96 or something yesterday, the same today, and it’s supposed to be 99 tomorrow.
The weird thing is that it’s humid. Not like steamy, but more than we’re used to, for sure. About twenty percent humidity.
That almost never happens here; usually, as the temperature rises, the humidity goes down. But not right now. It does prevent the plants from transpiring too much water, so I guess the humidity is okay. It certainly is different.
I still have to check on things.
Cotton is flying through the garden, but it’s not from cottonwoods, rather from the willows along the canal. The guy I live with said cottonwoods and willows are in the same family.
It’s kind of hard to believe that just an inch and a half (give or take) or rain two weeks ago brought out the mushrooms in the “way back”, under the Wasatch maples.
This was a big one.
The Persian yellow rose is having an excellent year.
The guy I live with posted some different pictures of this rose on Facebook, and a couple of people said something about “blackspot”. Even with mushrooms growing in the garden, and the extra humidity, it’s too dry for things like “blackspot”.

There are other roses. This is kind of a crummy picture of ‘Darlow’s Enigma’.
‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ rambler. Tiny little flowers.
The salvias are starting to flower, too. This is Salvia sclarea var. turkestanica. Kind of a smelly plant.
Melica ciliata, too. We probably have too much of this in the garden. The guy I live with didn’t know it would seed around so much.
It started out in the “way back” border, but instead of going into the field, which would be wrong, it’s seeded in the other direction, toward the house.
Speaking of seeds, the guy I live with hasn’t been too happy about his overall results with seeds this year (not that the seeds didn’t germinate, but a lot of seedlings died), but the ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glories have done really well.
There are two pots of these which will going into The Enclosure and hopefully the plants will climb up the fence.

Some plants came in the mail. They took longer to arrive than expected. I guess that’s nothing new, these days. The guy I live with was a bit concerned about plants in boxes in this heat, but only one plant didn’t make it.
Some were a little rootbound, so they’re being repotted into larger pots with the “special soil” surrounding the rootball, and then watered a lot. The “super genius” method I talked about some time ago.
Looking back on that post, it’s hard to believe how much the garden has changed just since I’ve been here. A lot of plants have died, some have thrived, and new ones have been added to the garden.
Anyway, this is the special soil.
Almost no organic matter at all.

So that’s really it for today. Oh, except that a hawkmoth flew into the kitchen last night. That was kind of exciting. The guy I live with caught it with his hands, let it go outside, and it flew back into the kitchen. It was caught and let go again. Of course I wanted to catch it and eat it, but the guy I live with told me not to do that. I guess he’s never tried moths.
I’ll leave you with another atmospheric picture of me taking care of the garden yesterday evening. The sunbeam didn’t quite illuminate me, which was disappointing.

Until next time, then.