the miserable gardener

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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today with some fairly interesting news. You may remember me from such other newsworthy posts as “Some Nose News”,among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.  I bet you can tell that the weather has changed here. It’s been pretty nice. They say it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, which the guy I live with says is just fine. It rained for about four hours the other day; that was different.

I’d like to make a little prologue about the news I’m going to report. For some reason this is important to the guy I live with. We purebred border collies don’t have to deal with much of this, which leads me to believe that we’re just superior. I only worry about my breakfast and dinner, though I always get them right on time.

He says, “You know how when you do something, some people will always react with something negative, no matter what it is?”
We have a new metal friend.
The garage is filled with something called “new car smell”. And now we have a car that starts, reliably, in case we have to go anywhere in a hurry.
The guy I live with didn’t want to say what that meant, though I know if I had to go to the doctor, late at night, like if I ate something the guy I live with said not to but I did anyway, we would just go, even in three feet of snow, without fretting about a fifteen-year-old car.

“What if the economy collapses? What if gas prices go to ten dollars a gallon? What if there’s World War III? What if you can’t get gas any more?”
The guy I live with said he bets most people reading this post know people who say things like that.

He says he has two parrots; one on each shoulder.  (I’ve never seen them.)
The parrot on the right shoulder babbles stuff like those questions. It chatters constantly, loudly, about all sorts of things that drive him crazy.
When it gets to be almost too much, the parrot on his left shoulder (closer to the heart), leans in to him and whispers, “She died“.
And then he sees things for what they are.

Well, so, anyway, that’s our big news, at least in the reliable transportation department. I have some other news, as well.
The bulb frames are gone.
The bases of two of the frames are still there, though eventually they’ll be removed.
There’s a whole new planting space which you can sort of see on the right.
You can also see that we have a lot of puschkinias.

They’ve seeded all over the place.
There are even more in the beds to the left of the picture. These are Puschkinia scilloides, which used to be called P. libanotica. Very common in the bulb trade.

All kinds of bulbs are in flower now. This is Fritillaria pudica.
This is Tulipa kaufmanniana ‘Ugam’. Named, I think, for a mountain range in Uzbekistan.
Tulips, if you didn’t know, are mostly native to regions of the world that have a climate pretty much exactly like ours. The guy I live with has always wondered why the Front Range of the Rockies doesn’t have more species of bulbs, but it doesn’t, for some reason. No doubt a weird evolutionary reason.

I guess this tulip is also marketed as ‘Ice Stick’.

There are “regular” tulips here, too, and though they’re perennial, they do tend to disappear in what the guy I live with says are “annoying ways”, like he would plant a few dozen, and only ten of them would come back year after year. He says it’s because they’re “bred plants”, of which there are very few in the garden. But the species tulips, like the one pictured above, always come back.

So that’s it for the news. I hope you didn’t find the guy I live with’s pontificating, which I did because he said to, excessively tiresome. I do have to live with him, after all, so I know what it’s like.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me after a long day of gardening.

Until next time, then.