the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here on this somewhat snowy day to while away the while by describing Our Modern Lifestyle, which I hope you may find at least moderately entertaining. You may remember me from such highly (not moderately) entertaining posts as “The Sun Was Out”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

This is my bed, if you didn’t know. I share it with the guy I live with. He says that sometimes I’m a bed hog, which I think is slightly rude. But I do like a bit of room.

The upstairs bedroom is pretty small, and, I think, extremely cozy. A mattress and foundation were put up there a long time ago, and eventually the guy I live with started sleeping up there with Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here, while his wife slept downstairs with Pooka, the second purebred border collie who lived here. When he got old and irritable, Flurry would get upset by firecrackers or thunder and attack Pooka, sometimes in the middle of the night. So this arrangement was made, and everybody slept much better.

Sometimes, during the day, Flurry would get so terribly frightened and agitated by thunder he would have to spend time in the bathtub, where he felt safe. If things got really bad he would try to scratch his way through the bathroom door, or even turn the handle with his teeth.

Flurry was kind of a nut. The guy I live with said he should be taken to a Border Psycolliegist, but that never happened. And the bathroom stuff has been left as it is, because the guy I live with said this was a house full of ghosts. Friendly ones, I’m happy to say.

In fact, there are several things containing ashes in the upstairs bedroom, which the guy I live with thinks it’s inappropriate to show, but they impart an even cozier feeling up there. Maybe it’s hard to explain.

There are certainly a lot of books in the bookshelf that the guy I live with’s wife built. You can see the shelf, behind me, in the first picture.

This is what he sees when he wakes up in the morning. A print of a painting by Rosa Bonheur, an ancient mah jongg set, a sort of gamelan, and a display of rubber stamps the guy I live with’s wife made from an old typesetting box. 

Most of the books were hers. He says H. Allen Smith was a really funny writer. 

There’s a peculiar chair by the window.

Next to an ancient dresser, which is mostly full of greeting cards. The mirror is a zillion years old, I think.And a thing, I guess you would call it, on the wall, with dried flowers. When the guy I live with took this picture, he burst into tears. He can be like that.

This is the view out of the bedroom window. The window frames are this gross aluminum stuff, but there has never seemed to be any need to replace them.There’s a book on the nightstand, on the lower shelf, which the guy I live with sometimes reads from.

At the entrance to this bedroom, there’s this odd thing hanging on the wall.

On the other wall, kitty corner from it, is an old hand-colored print of a goatsucker. A page from an old book. The guy I live with bought that after his wife died, and had it framed. That was one way he made it through the first few years without her. Painting the house, and buying engravings, having them framed, and hanging them on the walls. Things like this are surprisingly inexpensive. (I think this was sixty dollars. Cheaper than some snowdrops.)

He likes the self-satisfied expression of the goatsucker.

Mozart had been dead for less than a year when this was engraved.

Next door is what was built as the master bedroom but has never been that. Where the snowdrops and cyclamen, and other plants, live.

There’s an engraving of William Blake on the wall, done when he was still alive. The guy I live with said, though, that this was like a “second state”, and not the original first issue. But still, he likes it.

The view from the window in this room.

There are some framed pages from a cactus book by Karl Schumann made in 1900 on the stairs. 

Farther down the stairs are watercolors his grandfather did. He got these from his mom’s house after she died, and likes the paintings there, instead of bare walls. I think this is a fire station, maybe in Newport, Rhode Island, which is where he was from.The house on Prairie Avenue in Newport, which was built by the guy I live with’s great uncle Jim, who was a master carpenter. The guy I live with’s mom said the house was built entirely out of oak. It’s still there. On the other wall, pages from old botanical books.

I know most of the downstairs, especially the studio, has been shown before, but I think not this funny little frog mirror. The guy I live with’s wife got it from her mom.Back upstairs, the rest of the books by Graham Stuart Thomas, and some by Christopher Lloyd, on the partition between the living room and kitchen.

The view from the kitchen window, today.When they moved into the house, the partition was made of this “hideous orange plastic textured thing”, which the guy I live with’s wife removed almost the first week, and made these shelves. That’s her picture there.The Buddha, or Hotei, is real ivory, from the old days. The guy I live with’s mom accidentally broke a couple of the fingers. “Condition issues”, like they would say on The Roadshow. I know the grasshopper has been shown before, but I think it can’t hurt to show it again.

Well, that’s it. I hoped you enjoyed some different pictures showing our modern lifestyle, and especially, maybe, what my life is like in the house, here, on a snowy day with nothing else to do. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here this evening to tell you all about my day. You may remember me from such posts as “Weirdly Lit”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It was a very nice day today.

You can see that there’s still a bunch of snow everywhere, but it was about fifty degrees today. Not enough heat to do much of anything about the “new melt-proof snow”

I need to go back to yesterday (which I guess is the desire of most humans, isn’t it?) to show you that some genuine garden-related activity has taken place recently (instead of just a lot of sighing). Some eremurus seeds were sown. Eremurus spectabilis, to be precise.

The seeds were run through a sieve to get rid of most of the chaff. A horticultural sieve, no less. 

Then the seeds were mixed with some coarse sand (paving sand, purchased at a box store). The sand was slightly dampened.

Then wrapped in a towel (to keep the bags from freezing), put in this container, which went into the crisper drawer of the refrigerator.

The seeds will be checked for germination in about a month. Or they may just be sown into pots at that time, and put on the shelves upstairs. I’m not sure which.

Well, that was the gardening. Now back to today. The guy I live with has become kind of irritable, which is a side effect of the treatment he’s undergoing. Lots of expletives. He has also been having hot flashes.

Most of his good friends are women, and so he was able to talk to a couple of friends and see if this is what was really happening, and it is. Another side effect. Though not as severe as happen to some people. He thought about his wife falling down the stairs, and then …

But anyway, it was so nice today that we did go out into the garden to look at stuff. There are quite a few snowdrops flowering in the Snowdrop Frame. Not very good phone pictures. 

As some of you may know, there has been endless complaining about the snow, and no place for snowdrops to be in flower out in the garden now, which is unusual for here (more expletives), and while we were looking around the garden there was a steady stream of whining and berating the “awful snow” and all that, and how there was no place at all which wasn’t free of snow so there might be snowdrops, and, well, um….

The guy I live with stood and stared at this area for quite some time. Then he said something rather more loudly than maybe he ought to have. Not the sort of thing one hears from gentle gardeners.

This is the sand pile. The picture isn’t very good, because he still hasn’t got the measure of the new phone, but the north side of the pile is where it looks like depressions from someone’s knees when they were planting seeds there just today. So he was right there just an hour or two earlier and didn’t even think of this.

Between the north slope of the sand pile, and the trunks of the New Mexican privets there, is an area which is, oh, you know, obviously empty. There is nothing there. (There are some crown imperials, Fritillaria imperialis, planted there, but they flower later.) And there is no snow, even though the rest of the back yard is covered with the stuff.

There could have been snowdrops planted there for years. And they would be flowering now. All of the autumn-flowering species could be planted here, too. Again with the expletives.

You can guess how quickly this situation will be rectified.

Eventually it was time for my walk. We had to stop at a neighboring house (people I really like) to tell them all about everything (except for the snowdrop business), and of course look at sleeping owls. I wanted to go down the coyote path behind the house, so we did. There was some water in the creek. The willows at the end of this walk. The path stops here. We could go left, and up to the street, but we turn around instead.

On the way back home, the guy I live with made me stop on the sidewalk so he could make a movie. He took a picture of some juniper berries (Juniperus monosperma) in our front yard, first.

There is an awful lot of traffic noise from the highway, half a mile or more away, in this movie. He doesn’t know why the camera makes this traffic noise so loud.

So that was my day, expletives and all.

Until next time, then.