the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today just to show some pictures and maybe talk a bit. You may remember me from such posts as “The Finished Project”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I really like this chair. Not as much as the couch, but pretty close. The guy I live with said that other purebred border collies who’ve lived in this house have liked that chair, too. There must be something about it, besides being old and creaky.

Not much has been happening here. Well, that’s not totally true, since it snowed and then the snow melted, and some actual work was done in the garden. Hard to believe, I know.A whole bunch of things were cut down, raked up, put in that trash can, and then the can was carried over to the compost pile.  I’m not sure if you can see the difference here at all, though.The plastic on the frames was lifted off, a little, today, so that snowdrops and stuff could get some extra sun.It was a little gloomy today.But there are snowdrops up in the frames. And the cyclamen are doing pretty well, in the upstairs bedroom. (It was built as a bedroom but hasn’t been used as one.)

It’s kind of surprising to me, still, how things change from day to day, here. One day there’s ice in the canal, with patterns and stuff,and then the next, someone has walked down the bed of the canal.Today there was a hawk.There have been owls every evening now. The guy I live with posted a picture of the pair of them, sleeping, on Facebook. This was after a pretty cold night; the owls seem to like to sleep together then, but mostly they sleep apart, and then sit in separate trees in the evenings. 

You can see how large the talons are in this picture. Pretty scary. We’re not sure what’s wrong with this one’s left eye.

I guess I need to be on the lookout for owls. This time, one flew right over us, totally silent, and not very high off the ground.The sunset this evening was pretty great, so I have a bunch of sunset pictures.We always see geese and ducks flying across the sunset; the guy I live with says that they fly from smaller lakes to the big reservoirs southeast of us. Pretty neat, huh? (We purebred border collies use words like “neat”, if you didn’t know.)

Well, that’s really it for today. Not a huge whole of a lot. The weather has been pretty nice, and so the guy I live with has been in a good mood, considering the season and all.
I’ll leave you with a not-very-in-focus but super atmospheric picture of me, on my evening walk yesterday. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you, well, just some stuff. You may remember me from such posts as “Sunsets, Shadows, And Snowdrops”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

You know how you do something and then a little while, or a long while, later, you think you should have done something else? Maybe it’s just the guy I live with, but now he wonders why he didn’t plant more of the native birches in the garden here. True, it’s had a rough time over the years, but it’s still here, and it’s always attractive. Sometimes the branches die, but then the dead branches attract downy woodpeckers, looking for bugs.
The native birch, Betula occidentalis, is actually native to the big creek just to the north of us, Bear Creek, but it’s hard to find in nurseries. This one was purchased about thirty-five years ago from a local nursery that specialized in native western plants.
The guy I live with said he saw a couple at another nursery last year, and he might drive out there next year to see if the nursery still has them. It “would be cool” if nurseries sold him plants in the middle of winter, but I guess they don’t.

He and his friend went to Denver Botanic Gardens a couple of days ago and he said he wished that the garden here had been more Japanese in style. He especially likes this little entrance gate, which he said was called a hougei, which I guess is Japanese for “welcome”. But the construction in the garden here, which was mostly done by his wife, is very satisfactory. The fence around the enclosure is sort of falling apart, but that can be fixed. You can see one extra-slanty bit right here. This picture was taken a couple of days ago, when the guy I live with sawed off a big branch on the apple tree that the snow had broken. Here I am guarding the piece of branch.  Well, a weird thing has happened. Not really weird as in creepy, just very unusual. The water in the canal is flowing again. That maybe has never happened before. (This, like the picture above, is a not-very-focused phone picture.)

There are a lot of crocuses in flower now. It was seventy-seven degrees yesterday, and almost that today (so you can tell it’s going to snow tonight…), and the crocuses really liked that.  Crocus speciosus is in flower all over the garden.

The snow will wreck them, but there will be more.

This is Crocus cartwrightianus ‘Halloween’, a little bit late.  The guy I live with says this is a “crummy phone picture”. He said the phone can take good pictures, but it doesn’t always. He says it’s probably not the phone’s fault. 

So on our walk this evening we noticed that there might be a pretty nice sunset, and it turned out that our noticing was pretty accurate. We both try to be expert noticers of things. The guy I live with purposely does not pay attention to a lot of stuff, so he can notice the things that are more important to him. Like sunsets. 

Oh, of course we heard and then saw an owl, but it wasn’t sitting in a place where we could get a good picture. So the sunset pictures will have to do.

And that was our day. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, heading home on my walk, at sunset. 

Until next time, then.