Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you up to date on all the possibly less-than-exciting events in our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “My New Toy”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Looking at the greenness, you wouldn’t know how dry it is here, but let me tell you, it’s really dry. We’ve had about an inch (2.5cm) of rain since the first of July.
The guy I live with said if I looked back at blog posts done at this time of year there would be complaining about how dry it was and how it might never rain again, and you would think he would have become accustomed to this, but he says this drought is “anxiety-inducing”, and I happen to know that’s a subject he knows a lot about.
He also knows a lot about being irritated, and one especially irritating thing for him was the discovery that NOAA said this was the “third wettest August” in Denver history. He had no idea why they said that, because that’s not reflected on the CoCoRaHS database, but it turns out that these measurements were taken at the airport, which is thirty-three miles (53km) east of here.
It rains more out there. We got more snow and rain than “out there” up until June, but now the situation is reversed.
So the guy I live with has been watering, with some positive results.
Salvia darcyi is finally starting to flower, and maybe the last of the hummingbirds will notice it.
The guy I live with says this salvia is about as drought-tolerant as a tomato plant, but he still likes it a lot. He planted five plants in the front garden, which was a mistake, considering how wilty they get when the soil is dry.
The amount of water needed to keep those leaves turgid is considerable, though of course not if it gets the amount of rain it gets in its native habitat, 3.26 inches (82.9mm) in September, and since it grows in rocky soil in real life, all that rain goes right to the roots.
This is ‘Windwalker’ again, which is a cross between darcyi and Salvia greggii. (The latter is much more tolerant of dry soil, but won’t flower in late summer if it doesn’t rain or get irrigation.)
You can see the leaves are smaller, so less hydration is needed, but it still needed watering to get it to flower.
In other news, the first cyclamen are flowering. These are Cyclamen hederifolium; they flower without leaves, at first. This is called hysteranthy.
(I thought showing a picture of this growing with Hedera helix was a bit heavy-handed. The ivy is a cultivar called ‘Baltica’.)
Cyclamen purpurascens is flowering, too. This flowers with the leaves emerging at the same time; this is called synanthy.
This is a selection called ‘Extra Fancy’, because of the leaves.
In rainier climates this species will have green leaves all summer, but not here.
And there are some colchicums. These are all hysteranthous; the leaves appear in the spring.
This is Colchicum autumnale ‘Nancy Lindsay’.
The guy I live with got this as Colchicum atropurpureum ‘Drake’s Variety’, but there’s no such thing, and he thinks this looks more like one called ‘Disraeli’.
That cultivar is known for its tesselation, or a sort of checkerboard pattern, which you can see.
And Colchicum kotschyi, from Iran.
Rest assured there will be more pictures of colchicums in future posts. There are a lot of colchicums in our garden, and I do mean a lot.
I’m pretty sure that’s all I have for today. I suspect I’m going to have to listen to a lot of complaints about the lack of rain, especially when rain is predicted and never arrives, which happens a lot, but I’ll manage.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 