the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here after a long absence, which I’ll explain later. You may remember me from such posts as “Sad Little Mysteries”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that the ramp, built for aging purebred border collies, has seen better days, and now it’s kind of bouncy. The guy I live with said he might reinforce it, or even replace it, though I think replacing it isn’t very likely.

It was really cold last week. I mean really cold, with a high of like three degrees (F) on one day.
The guy I live with took this picture of our garden one very cold night.
There wasn’t any reason to make a post except to say how cold it was, which wouldn’t be very interesting.
And then it warmed up. It was over seventy degrees (twenty-one Celsius) the last couple of days, which isn’t all that unusual for winters here.
The snowdrops and other things enjoyed the warm weather. The snowdrops are over a month late.
This is Colchicum hungaricum ‘Valentine’, flowering in the bulb frame.
There’s still a lot of snow in the garden, even though it’s been so warm.
The guy I live with says it’s not melting, or evaporating, fast enough, because it’s supposed to snow all next week, and so the snow would just pile up, which he says is very tiresome.
He’s sick of the snow and ice, and hurting his hip sliding around on the ice in the garden and out in the field. We have one more day of warm weather before it gets cold again.

The cold has been hard on both of us. No gardening, for one thing. And of course, when people hear how cold it’s been, and for so long, inevitably some people tell the guy I live with that he should move, as though his main interest in life were gardening, which it isn’t.
And then there was someone, after they heard that he lives in the house in which his wife died, who also told him he should move.
Which brings me to the title of my post.

That made the guy I live with pretty unhappy, and also very angry. He said that offering unsolicited advice is very hostile language, and hurtful, too. On top of the almost constantly awful news these days, this was just too much.
Ever since his wife died, the guy I live with has been ultra-sensitive to the thoughtless things people say, and doesn’t know why people say things like that.
I certainly wouldn’t want to leave my cozy little house, and my big back yard with squirrels to bark at, just because someone had it in their head that this would be a good idea.
And I know the guy I live with likes having all these memories of his wife, and the happy times they had together, scattered throughout the house.
I’m going to show some of these, now. I’m aware that I’ve shown things like this before, but the guy I live with said it was time to show more, partly because he was so irritated by “brainless” advice that he should move, and I guess also to illustrate what it’s like to live in a house haunted by memories. Haunted in a good way.
I don’t know what all of these things are, and, in some cases, neither does the guy I live with.
This box is in our bedroom, and was made by the guy I live with’s wife.
I think these are medicinal herbs.That’s Pooka, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, in the picture on the right.
The title of this (I had to ask the guy I live with) is “The little book of tropical wonders.  In many colors.”More books.So these are some of the many, many mysterious things that are all throughout my house.

Oh, I almost forgot. I’m supposed to say this, even though it’s a bit immodest.
When it was really cold last week, mice started sneaking into the house. The guy I live with baited several traps, the kind that don’t kill mice but just catch them, with “expired peanut butter”, and, sure enough, we caught a few.
But several evenings ago, I thought I heard, and smelled, something in a trap in the downstairs bedroom. There was. The guy I live with had forgotten that there was a trap down there, and he said if I hadn’t alerted him to the fact that there was a mouse in there, it might have died. He released the mouse into the garage.
The guy I live with rewarded me with extra biscuits, because he said I saved the life of a tiny little mouse.

And we’re not going to move, no matter what. I’m so relieved.

Until next time, then.

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.