the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, here today to talk about snowdrops, and some sentimental stuff. You may remember me from such sentiment-oriented posts as “A Short, Sentimental Post About The Couch”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
As I’ve said before, the ramp I’m lying beside was made by the guy I live with’s wife, so that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, could go outside when he got really old and creaky. The ramp is in pretty bad shape but the guy I live with isn’t going to replace it. It adds a certain sort of sentiment, I think.

Speaking of that, today marks the seventh anniversary of the death of Chess, the purebred border collie who lived here before me, and a very popular narrator of this blog. Like his cousin Slipper, and his wife, Chess died here at home. In the movie “Oliver’s Travels” there’s a line, “We are quite comfortable with our ghosts”, and that’s the way it is here.
He was going to do a post anyway, about snowdrops, but then decided that mentioning this was the right thing to do, so as not to seem too self-absorbed.

The guy I live with was well aware of what today meant, just like he knew what yesterday meant, when he went to see his friend.
He remembers dates, because they have numbers in them. Thursday is Reginald Farrer’s birthday; maybe the guy I live with will read something from his books to me. He says Farrer didn’t like snowdrops as much as he ought to have liked them, but that his friend E.A. Bowles certainly did.

All of this was prompted, though, by a visit to the mail box, because mail was delivered today.
The guy I live with noticed this when he opened the front door. This isn’t one that snowdrop enthusiasts would find interesting, but it’s here, and that’s what’s important.
This is a big deal, for two reasons. The first is that this is a self-sown seedling from the main colony of snowdrops at least twenty feet away, in the shade garden. The second is that this is in the front yard, which has not been watered since 1987, so this is a very dry situation for snowdrops, except in late winter and spring.

There are others. This one is very close to ‘Theresa Stone’ in appearance.
So, naturally, the guy I live with said he was going to transplant a bunch of Galanthus elwesii, which is what these are, into the front garden.

There are a lot of snowdrops “escaping” into the front garden, though most of them are covered with snow now.

The main group is starting to flower; some of the flowers were picked apart by birds, so the guy I live with put two “French scare cats” in that garden. You can see the cats in the “header” for this blog.
There will be even more snowdrops there in maybe a couple of weeks.

Not much else is happening here. There are snowdrops in flower in the frame, which is the farthest one away in this picture. Yes, the plastic-covered frame is ugly.By the way, when the frames are removed, the guy I live with said he’s going to have to put a fence along the “North Border”, but it has to be “vintage fence”, like this. He was hoping to go to the place in Morrison (not too far from here) with his friend, to look for some, but discovered the store had closed, like so many other stores, lately.
He says otherwise I’ll trample everything while I’m busy barking at squirrels. Squirrels do need to be barked at.

Here’s another form of Galanthus graecus.And Galanthus angustifolius.And finally, Crocus laevigatus is sort of flowering. This typically flowers earlier, but the soil has been pretty cold here.
Even though they’re not much to look at right now, the guy I live with was glad to see  them, because he couldn’t remember where the corms were planted, and thought they had died.
Well, that’s it for today. I hear I might get extra treats and cuddles because of what day it is.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me surveying my domain.

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 white stuff, though I may ramble a bit. You may remember me from such posts as “White Out”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. One you’ve never seen before, but still characteristic.
Rather noble and dignified, don’t you think?
Some people get jealous of my retractable ears; it’s easy to see why.

You may wonder what’s on the wall above the watering can. If not, I’m going to show it anyway.
“The Sleeping Gipsy”, by Henri Rousseau. Not the real thing, of course, because if it were, we’d have a secretary doing this blog, but instead a print that the guy I live with has had for about fifty years. (It’s straighter than it looks.)
He has the book The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck, who noted the “anticipation of cubism in the lower right-hand quarter” of the painting. His wife read the book and loved it. Every time he looks at that painting it reminds him of her enjoying the book so much, and the anticipation of cubism. That’s what he sees when he turns his head, after he wakes up and looks at his wife’s books on the other wall.

Well, anyway. The guy I live with has decided mostly not to complain about the snow (whew, huh?), because we do need water here, even though almost all of the snow evaporates instead of melts. It’s been so frightfully dry here that anything is welcome.
He went out and photographed these, this afternoon.
These are mostly Galanthus elwesii ‘Theresa Stone’, if you needed to know. There are hundreds of snowdrops in the shade garden, but the snow doesn’t melt (or evaporate) as quickly here as it does elsewhere.

Other snowdrops in the garden haven’t done so well, because the soil in which most of them were planted froze fairly early in the winter. (The soil in the shade garden isn’t frozen, just covered with snow.) I guess it was a miscalculation, but the soil here really didn’t start freezing until just a few winters ago. These snowdrops will be moved later this year to part of the garden where the soil doesn’t freeze.
This is ‘Three Ships’, which should have set sail in early December. Pretty pathetic, I know.
And ‘Daphne’s Scissors’, which, when it was in the snowdrop frame, was done flowering by the end of January. It was moved here, a couple of years ago.The guy I live with says this is really ‘Runs with Scissors’, because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.
So the guy I live with is going to have something to look forward to; digging up snowdrops.
There are other things planned for the garden this year; some major, some minor. I’ll be sure to talk about them when they happen. They might even be interesting; you never know.

There have been snowdrops in flower in the Snowdrop Frame since October. These are being grown in pots so they can be lifted easily, for sharing later.
This is a form of Galanthus graecus.
Form, not clone. The guy I live with hates the word “clone”, which anyway means vegetatively propagated, which these weren’t. If they were grown by twin-scaling, they would be clones.
Some of the really early-flowering snowdrops have bulked up nicely.
This is Galanthus peshmenii. This was done flowering by November.
And this is Galanthus reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’. Also done flowering, months ago.
The frame really doesn’t protect the snowdrops from cold, so much as it protects them from snow. The soil in the pots would freeze, which isn’t a bad thing except that it slows down growth.
Here’s one with a funny name; Galanthus snogerupii (or G. ikariae var. snogerupii). The leaves have tiny air pockets in them, which can cause trouble in our hot winter sun. It needs more shade. I think no one knows why the leaves have these air pockets.
You can see the air pockets in this picture.
Pretty fascinating, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

In another frame, which is open to the elements, there’s a nice potful of Stanleya pinnata. The guy I live with says the leaves were still growing until right before we had freezing weather. And now, I’m not sure why, I’m supposed to show the collection of rocks that sit in dishes out on the patio. The guy I live with said to, so I will. These don’t have anything to do with the color white, except there is an old bone in one of the dishes.
Maybe someone said something about the collection somewhere, so he thought showing it here would be worthwhile. It might not be, but the guy I live with says there are a lot of things more boring than this.
These are rocks given to the guy I live with’s wife, from people who collected them from all over the world. There are rocks from New Zealand and the Drakensberg in South Africa. All over the place, really. I don’t know which is which.
This next one has some railroad spikes from an old abandoned narrow-gauge railroad line up in the mountains, as well as a piece of coal. So that’s the rock collection.
Oh, I know: the guy I live with was saying how boring snow was, because it was white, even though he said he’d stop complaining about it, but the color is always the same, and would be a lot more interesting if every time it fell it was a different color. So he thought what’s more interesting than looking at snow that’s always the same color? Rocks, of course.
Snowdrops are all the same color, mostly, but they’re snowdrops, so that lets them off the hook. Plants that flower in the winter.

That’s what I have for today. You may be puzzled by all of this, but maybe I ought to tell you that the guy I live with can be kind of an enigma. I, on the other hand, am pretty down-to-earth. (They guy I live with says that’s because I’m shorter than he is, which isn’t as funny as he says it is.)

Until next time, then.