the miserable gardener

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 the latest news from our garden and its environs. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “Approaching The Equinox”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You wouldn’t know it, but I’ve been slightly under the weather. I have clostridium. My doctor said it was from eating rabbit poop, but rabbit poop is very tasty. It’s just grass that has gone through a bunny.
So I’m on an antibiotic and eating prescription food, and getting probiotic yogurt and pills hidden in wedges of Brie.

The guy I live with was almost more than under the weather when I dragged him out of the front door on our morning walk. He almost fell onto the concrete walk as I tugged on the leash.
He cut his arm, and there was a lot of blood, which is to be expected when you live with an older human.
I had an excuse though.
There was a fox on my driveway.

The fox followed us.
The guy I live with said it looked like it wanted to make friends with me, and he felt kind of sorry for it.
He also said there was plenty for a fox to eat around here, but he didn’t elaborate.

The guy I live with said next time he’s going to let me out of the front door a lot more cautiously.

And there are colchicums.
This is ‘Pink Star’.
This one has no label; it could be a seedling.
This one could also be a seedling. At first he thought it was ‘Jarka’, but that cultivar has pink at the bottom and white at the top.
There was a ‘Jarka’ here at one time, and maybe it produced this seedling.

‘Innocence’ is doing very well right now.
One ‘Innocence’ decided to be partly pink.

We walked around the garden to see how things are doing, like we always do, though usually I like to spend time barking at squirrels, but at one point I heard a little exclamation of surprise. The guy I live with said “Look there”.

The first snowdrop.

Galanthus bursanus.

The guy I live with said he could see more coming up. He said this is the best autumn-flowering snowdrop for our climate. This is considered to be hysteranthous because the leaves aren’t well-developed, as you can see. I talked about that in an earlier post.
He has all the other autumn-flowering species here, but this one does a lot better than the others.

There was a crocus in flower, too, but he forgot to take a picture of it.

I know he has mixed emotions about the coming of autumn. It was his wife’s favorite time of the year, along with Christmas, so he thinks about that, but this summer has been a really awful one, way too hot and way too dry.
He doesn’t have a lot of hope that we’ll get a bunch of rain, since we usually get less and less precipitation in the coming months, but at least it won’t be 95 degrees every day.
And maybe, he said, it will snow soon.

That’s all I have for today.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me photobombing what the guy I live with said was a very red sphaeralcea.

Until next time, then.

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 with movies, and other things.
You may remember me from such posts as “Some Movies”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Things are pretty overgrown here, as you can tell.

It’s a nice, quiet Sunday afternoon, and even though it didn’t rain yesterday like they said, it’s pretty pleasant here.

Believe it or not, there are more colchicums in flower here.
This is Colchicum davisii:
And this is ‘Innocence’, which the guy I live with says is the second-best white-flowered colchicum. (We do have the best, Colchicum speciosum ‘Album’, but you’ll have to wait for that one.)
You can see that these are growing in full sun. When colchicums are planted in a little bit too much shade they tend to fall over.
They’re also growing in the heavy clay that was spread over the nice native soil when the house was built fifty years ago.

So those are today’s colchicums.

A couple of hours ago the guy I live with when to do some work in “the enclosure”. I was surprised to hear the word “work”.
He couldn’t do anything, though, because there was someone in the enclosure who had much more important things to do.

The guy I live with just stood there very quietly with his phone. I was standing next to him but I could see what was happening.

The guy I live with took this as a sign to not do anything in this part of the garden.

So that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed the movies.

Until next time, then.