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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to let you know just how little has been going on here lately. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “More Endlessness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that the snow is still here.

And now it’s snowing again. The guy I live with says this might drive him up the wall, which I might like to see.

“Another endless winter” is what I keep hearing. The guy I live with says this could very well be the first February in memory where there are no snowdrops in the shade garden. A lot of them were up, before they got covered with snow back in January.
There was one snowdrop pathetically trying to flower in an almost snowless part of the garden, just today.
The enthusiasm for snowdrops started years ago, when winters didn’t have so much snow, but now the guy I live with is beginning to wonder if this is all worthwhile.
At this time fifteen years ago, there would have been snowdrops, crocuses, and hellebores in flower, but now there’s just snow. Nothing but snow. The snowdrops would all be finished by the end of March.

Until last night, though, the weather was pretty nice. It was almost sixty degrees yesterday, but that wasn’t enough to melt the ice and snow.
The weather changed by late evening.
The guy I live with did fill the bird feeders, again, today, when it started to snow, which I guess counts as working in the garden. I helped.

These arrived in the mail today. Not all of these seeds are for our garden. He’s going to try Lilium candidum from seeds this year, because the bulbs he ordered last year, to add to the ones already in the garden, never arrived.
Oddly, the letter that was in the mail box wasn’t picked up.

These came in the mail the day before that.
The guy I live with was going to post this picture on Facebook, because, you know, it’s snowing and this is hot sauce, but invariably someone would have made a comment that they couldn’t tolerate hot chili peppers, which the guy I live with would have thought was pretty dumb, because these bottles are staying here. For a while, anyway.

I’ve never had hot sauce, but I hear that Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here would lap it up. Maybe I should try it some time. The guy I live with says he’s not going to offer me any, even though he says it’s “not all that hot, compared to other things”. Like the ghost pepper sauce they offer. “Compared to other things” doesn’t mean much to me.

There is plenty to do indoors, anyway, while it’s snowing. I prefer napping. The TV is on a lot, because the guy I live with likes to hear human voices. There are a lot of compact discs in the house, so there’s music from time to time. And even more books, but he doesn’t read much, unless it’s a book on music. He used to read a lot, decades ago, and when his wife was here he read a lot of gardening books, but not any more.

Her memory is kept alive partly by the books she owned. The guy I live with hasn’t read many of them. This is one:
He remembers the day she bought this book, and a couple of other old Everyman’s Library books.

The other day, he found this book, which had fallen behind something. Another old Everyman’s Library book. It was his grandfather’s, and is in pretty bad shape. I guess it was used a lot, maybe a hundred years ago.

He keeps it for sentimental reasons. There isn’t much of anything that’s relevant for this climate, or so I hear.

I guess I’m rambling now. We purebred border collies are supposed to be highly focused, but we do get distracted, like say by squirrels, or in this case, hot sauce and books.
I’ll leave you with a rather atmospheric picture of me.

Until next time, then.