the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on all the happenings around here. You may remember me from such posts as “Fencing Lessons”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m busy protecting the garden, as you can see.

Today was our first day without wind in about two weeks. The wind has been driving both of us crazy, with “fire weather” warnings every day. I guess it’s supposed to be windy again tomorrow, but maybe there will be some rain this weekend. The guy I live with just rolls his eyes when they say things like that; the weather here has changed from what it was last century, or so he says.

One thing that’s odd; the weather people have said there’s no evidence that it’s windier this year than any other. More rolling of the eyes. I think even on this blog I’ve reported the complaints of endless days of no wind, just the same air every day. And now the wind blows almost every day.
He says people should get outside more.

He was going to go up to Boulder with his friend, to Harlequin’s Gardens, his favorite nursery here, now, but he called her and canceled because he thought neither of them would have a very good time standing in freezing cold wind, looking at plants. She agreed.
On the other hand, he was kind of disappointed, because he would have driven with her in our “bossy” new car.
It tells him what to do. Like drive carefully and stuff. And the other day, when he went to the store, a car in front suddenly slowed down, and so our car slowed itself down. It has a camera in the front, as well as the rear.

Anyway, there isn’t all that much in flower, because the wind hasn’t been warm. We see ice in the birdbath every morning, and even though the plants haven’t been affected, much, some of them seem reluctant to grow more.
The fritillarias are flowering away. This is Fritillaria sewerzowii. Maybe not the greatest picture.
This is from places like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
If you’re wondering how the guy I live with pronounces the specific epithet (not that it matters) he says “sev-ert-SOFF-ee-eye”, because it’s a German transliteration of the name Severtzov.
Some botanists place it in a separate genus, Korolkowia, which he would pronounce “kor-ol-KOFF-ee-a”.
This is probably the only instance where he would try to pronounce the botanical names like the people they were named after, because he took German in college. And because if the botanists who named them had been English speakers, instead of Baltic Germans, the names would have been spelled differently, and maybe more easily pronounced.

The fritillarias have been here for a number of years, and now they’re producing seedlings.
Behind these plants are a couple of Fritillaria eduardii. This is a fairly crummy picture.
The flowers have been slightly damaged by the freezing cold winds.
This plant is related to Fritillaria imperialis but doesn’t have the skunky smell. I know what skunks smell like, believe me.
We have a lot of imperialis in the garden, and the guy I live with says he can smell them when they’re in the ground, right before they emerge from the soil. I don’t know if that’s creepy or not, because I can smell a lot of things that humans can’t.

Like if we have a visitor, I can tell it’s them if they return two weeks later. You wouldn’t believe all the things I can smell, but maybe you wouldn’t want to know.
I can smell mice in the garden. The guy I live with, who now claims to have super hearing, can hear them rustling around, but I can hear them breathing. I tried to catch one the other day, but the guy I live with, as usual, said not to.

The native bluebells are flowering. This is Mertensia lanceolata. If you drove west a few minutes from our house, to Red Rocks Park, you could see them there, along the road up to the amphitheater.
It’s a dryland plant, and will go dormant fairly soon after flowering.

And Viburnum farreri is flowering. This normally flowers here any time from mid-December onward (the guy I live with used to make pilgrimages with his wife to Denver Botanic Gardens to see it in flower in winter there), but, obviously, it’s late.
Better late than never, I guess. It’s one of the few plants here that gets extra water in the summertime. The flowers are scented of heliotrope.
And the guy I live with loves it because he loves the writing of Reginald Farrer.

So, the other thing I have to report, is something I guess I only partly understand. I get that the guy I live with didn’t want to leave me alone on a scary windy day, because he likes me, and maybe this is similar.
I hear about the guy I live with’s wife, all the time. He sometimes cries when he thinks about her. I know they were happily married for twenty-seven years, and I guess I understand that in a relationship there has to be some give and take. He lets me do things he wouldn’t ordinarily like, because we also have a relationship.

She wanted feverfew in the garden, and Allium aflatunense, too. The feverfew is now a weed in the garden.
The allium is from Kyrgyzstan, and ordinarily the guy I live with would be very interested in something like that, similar climates and all, but in this case, well, let’s just say it’s worse than the feverfew.
I think someone has a lot of digging-up to do.
I know he does better, day to day, if he has something that needs to be done, although he constantly keeps telling me he has a hard time getting motivated to do things, but in this case, if the alliums aren’t dug up, there will be “zillions more”, so he has a lot of work ahead of him.
I plan to help in my usual way.

It turns out that even though there was a huge amount of complaining about the constant snow cover this past winter, it had an effect on the plants here, that of dramatically increasing the populations of a number of plants. Some good, some not so good. I may talk about that in another post.

But that’s all for now. I’ll leave you with a sort of atmospheric picture of me looking out into the garden. Yes, the pipe on the chiminea is leaning; it’s almost completely rusted out. You can also see that there’s now a baffle above the suet feeder, to keep the squirrel from stealing all the suet. It’s for downy woodpeckers and nuthatches; not squirrels. It’s my job to chase the squirrel away from things like this. I’m very good at it.

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 talk about the wind. You may remember me from such posts as “Smoke And Wind”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If you’re wondering what all that stuff is, besides the puschkinias, from left to right there’s a dwarf ponderosa pine; Cercocarpus montanus in front; the yucca-looking thing is Nolina greenei; the cactus is Cylindropuntia whipplei; the oak, with its brown leaves, is Quercus undulata. The big branchy thing I’m lying under is Cotoneaster multiflorus. It smells awful when it flowers.

What I’m relaxing on will be a new bed for, well, mostly bulbs I guess, so I won’t be able to lie right on it, according to the guy I live with, but of course I will anyway.

You can see how the path on the north side of the garden looks now, with the frames gone.
Lots of planting spaces again.

The lilac, ‘Annabel’, framed by the arbor, is about ninety feet away.
The big green thing, to the right of the trap (which isn’t set), and a bit closer to the camera, is an Eremurus robustus. The guy I live with was surprised to see it there. (All that other green stuff is Allium aflatunense, which his wife wanted, but the guy I live with didn’t, and still doesn’t want.)
He planted half a dozen Eremurus robustus in the “way back” garden, in a place where he thought they would do well, and all of them rotted last winter. He was pretty put out about that, but decided to plant more in the open area on the right in the picture above. Eremurus do very well in the garden here.
I guess he miscalculated just how wet the “way back” gets in the winter; all the melting snow drains down there, because it’s lower than the main back garden by at least three feet.

It’s been windy for the last several days. We were under “fire weather” warnings every day. I didn’t worry about that, but the guy I live with did. He says he does the worrying for both of us, so I can lead a happy, carefree life.

Even with the wind, there are things in flower.
This is Fritillaria raddeana.
There were other, older, and larger bulbs in the garden, close to where these were, but the guy I live with sliced through the bulbs with his trowel, thinking they were in a different place. I guess I wasn’t supposed to talk about that, but the language I heard when that happened was something else.

This is (maybe) Fritillaria nigra. Some people say it should be called F. pyrenaica.
There are dozens of other “frits” about to flower here, but it’s supposed to get colder and maybe even snow this week, so who knows what will happen.

Some other things. The guy I live with went to the Asian market. He likes that store, a lot. It was one of his “safe places” to go, after his wife died. I’ve probably talked about the way he feels about Asian things. He said it was kind of weird going there in the new car, partly because it’s been strange for him to go there by himself for all these years, but also because of the automatic transmission, which he’s figured out, and not having to take a key out of the ignition (which he says is “beyond totally weird”).
He got some important household items.
Thai chilies, which he can’t live without, and kimchi. (Oh, and you can see dumpling wrappers; he makes jao tze every now and then, and wontons, too.) There was already a jar of kimchi in the refrigerator, and so I wondered, but he said this was even better, though not quite as good as the kimchi he can get at H Mart, but that’s a long way away.

He also got some sriracha sauce.
The bottle on the left. I hear that if you really know your sriracha sauce, you call the sauce on the left “rooster sauce”, for obvious reasons, because it isn’t quite like the real thing from Thailand (bottle on the right).
He likes rooster sauce the best.

He went to the health food store after that. He told me that at the Asian market almost everyone was wearing a mask, but at the health food store almost no one was.
That was something he thought about for quite a while.

The other news, which isn’t about food I’m not allowed to eat, has to do with the canal.
It has water in it.
No one removed all the dead grass from the banks, so it looks very different this year. Last spring was very wet, relatively speaking, and the grasses grew like crazy; there are even some clumps growing in the canal.
But it was very pleasant to see water flowing. And as soon as the water started to flow, other creatures noticed it.
Well, that’s it for today. We’ve been able to do some gardening, even with the wind. I like gardening as much as the guy I live with does, though of course my approach to it is very different, and mostly involves watching.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, taken in the morning, while I was still in the ancient, creaky chair I like to sleep in. After we’re done watching “Q.I.” at night, and the guy I live with switches the program to one that helps him sleep, I like to go down and sleep in the chair that, so I’ve heard, all the other purebred border collies who’ve lived here have slept in, too.

Until next time, then.