the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on our isolated and distanced modern lifestyle. You may remember me from such posts as “Passing The Time”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I was helping the guy I live with today. He was working out in the “way back” digging out some of the smooth brome (just to my left, there), to make that part of the garden look less awful. It’s a huge amount of work because the grass has roots that go everywhere. Everywhere except down.
He used his hori-hori for some of the digging. It’s a tool he’s used for a long time.
So in the evening this was what things looked like. He got quite a bit done even with the smell from next door. He always has a bandanna handy now. A box from Edelweiss Perennials arrived yesterday. That’s right, on Monday. It took an extra-long time to get here but everything was perfectly fine.
A bunch of epimediums and some anemones. Anemone nemorosa.
Maybe you remember the last time epimediums came to the garden, in the hilariously-titled post, “Epimedium Rare”; well, those were planted at kind of the wrong time of year, and the survival rate was not terrific. So more were ordered, and will be planted (eventually) at the right time of the year, which is now.

I’m going to digress here a bit. It’s May. The most painful month of all for the guy I live with. His wife died (very suddenly) on the twenty-fourth, and, also, he met her right about this time of year, too.
When they met, she had her own record collection (which he gave away, along with his own collection, after she died, as I said in my last post), and there are some records that remind him of that time. Naturally.
And that was the reason why he dragged out the turntable. He decided maybe he should try to find some of those records again. Ones that were never transferred to compact disk.
(If you didn’t know it already, the guy I live with is pretty sentimental.)
He found a place where he could get some of the records. Not a lot of money will be involved, which came as a relief to both of us.
I didn’t know anything at all about records, things which the guy I live with has always loved, and he explained that these were round flat things made of vinyl (sort of) that rotated at 33 1⁄3 revolutions per minute, or r.p.m., as they say.  There were earlier records that were 78 r.p.m., made of shellac, and then also, later, 45 r.p.m. (There was a struggle between Columbia Records and RCA Records as to which speed, 33 1⁄3 or 45 r.p.m, respectively, was the best, after “the 78” became obsolete, and Columbia won, though ironically a lot of audiophile LPs are now pressed in 45 r.p.m. There was also 16 2⁄3 r.p.m.)
Well, whew, anyway, when the records start appearing here, I’ll show you what he got. I can pretty much guarantee these will be nothing like what you imagine.

Okay, now about the anemones. The guy I live with had a friend, Nina, who lived in New York. I’ve probably mentioned her before. They corresponded for over twenty years, but never met. She sent him his first Cyclamen coum, and also things like Anemone nemorosa. The blue one, ‘Robinsoniana’, flourished for a while but I think has died out. (New plants are in the flat pictured above.)
Like with the cyclamen, when he goes into the shade garden on the north side of the house, he thinks of his friend.
She was the third person he called when his wife died. His friend Nina went into surgery a few weeks later; there were complications I think, and she died the following January. At the same time that Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, was diagnosed with liver cancer.
The anemones sing their bittersweet song to the guy I live with. Here are a few:

Anemone nemorosa ‘Vestal’.

A form with pink-backed petals.

Anemone ranunculoides. Like nemorosa but yellow.

I know I don’t show plants in the shade garden a lot. I don’t go in there because there’s a gate.
The guy I live with, who, like me, can be naughty sometimes, has planted a whole bunch of the dragon arum, Dracunculus vulgaris, in the garden, in hopes that the stench of the flowers will cancel out the stench of his neighbor’s laundry. It’s not likely because the latter smell is overpowering to the extent that it often makes him sick, but he says it’s funny to imagine a whole bunch of plants reeking of rotting flesh. He says he’s going to keep ordering the dragon arum until our whole garden reeks to high heaven. I can hardly wait.

Okay, I guess that’s it. Kind of an odd post, maybe, but we are living in odd times. At least I don’t have to wear a mask.

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 bring you up to date on all the thrilling happenings here. Okay, well, not really, but I felt like I had to say something. You may remember me from such posts as “Passing The Time”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I think the photographer missed part of my tail. Maybe because he doesn’t have one and doesn’t think a tail is all that important, but it really is.

Anyway things have been kind of static here, lately. It snowed, like they said it would, but now that’s all melted, and there was a lot of damage to the garden. On top of the considerable damage to plants this past winter.
The guy I live with only partly cares about this, but there were some really irksome things that needed to be attended to, like the Paul’s Himalayan Musk rambler, that died almost completely back to the ground.You should have heard what he said when he started cutting this down and got jabbed by all the thorns. The guy I live with said they were prickles, and not thorns. Like that made a difference. His hands were all bloody.

At least there was wind, which is no longer as common as it used to be, and it was coming from the west. The guy I live with has been feeling sick, on and off, from the very strong perfumed smell of laundry coming from his neighbors’ house. The smell is often so strong that he has breathing problems, and can’t work out in the garden like he wants to. This has been an ongoing thing for quite a while now. I don’t talk about it much because it isn’t very pleasant. I’m not sure why people do the things that they do.

The guy I live with got the car fixed. That was a big deal. The car sat in the garage for a few weeks. He calls it our “metal friend”, because it can take us places if we need to go there. He had it towed to the dealer’s, and then towed back again. He has a friend whose husband worked for Subaru for thirty years and who told him the fuel pump was going. He trusted that information, so he had the fuel pump replaced as well as the oil changed, and all of that stuff, so I could go to the doctor’s to have my shots and generally be looked at. My doctor said I was totally excellent. I already knew that.

So then the guy I live with was going to go to the urologist’s next week, for a blood test, but they called and said not to come, because of the virus. And that was weird. He doesn’t mind going to the urologist’s because he feels well cared for.
The guy I live with has been looking at stuff about the virus, stuff posted by medical professionals, not politicians or talk show hosts, and even though he’s not squeamish at all, he is pretty creeped out by all of this. He doesn’t talk to me about it, though.

The thing is, he would really like to go out to lunch with his friend, or go with her to the botanic gardens, and right now he can’t. All of the plant sales have been cancelled or postponed. The Mother’s Day plant sale at the botanic gardens was something he looked forward to every year, partly because he likes being in crowds of people, and the “vibe” there (I didn’t know that word until recently) was something he enjoyed a lot.

One maybe ultra-odd thing has happened. The guy I live with went into the crawlspace yesterday and dragged out his old turntable.
It’s about thirty years old, but it’s not just any old turntable. He spent some time assembling the tonearm and attaching it to the mount on the turntable.
He said that, eventually, the downstairs bedroom will possibly get some new furniture and there will be a couch and maybe he’ll sit down there during the winter and listen to music on headphones, or something. A couch big enough for both of us, of course.
He gave away all the LPs that were in the house (a couple thousand, at least) after his wife died, so he might need to get a few. And headphones.

Maybe I should get back to some gardening. The guy I live with spent an hour or so in the front yard, working on things, today, so that the fence which had to be removed when the sewer drain was replaced could be put back. The front garden is still pretty much of a mess.

The juno irises suffered quite a bit from the record low temperatures we had when it snowed the first time. They were covered in snow the second time, but it wasn’t like that helped any. I forget which one this is.The main thing, though, is still the corydalis. Forms of Corydalis solida. The guy I live with purchased quite a few of these from nurseries overseas, in the Baltic states, but you can also get them from Odyssey Bulbs. Not all of these pictures are the greatest ever. I think this one is called ‘Going Rouge’; it came from Odyssey. I’m under the impression that this is just about all I have for today. The guy I live with says it might snow tomorrow, like this will never, ever end, but that then next week it will be close to eighty degrees. That doesn’t mean it still can’t snow, which I know is hard to believe, but snowing is something it does a lot of here, and often at the most inconvenient times. I keep hearing about how much the guy I live with wishes he lived in a place where it didn’t snow so much, but I know nothing will ever be done about that.

Until next time, then.