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 the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Hair Cut”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The shed isn’t really leaning like the picture suggests; I think it’s from what’s called “barrel distortion” from the camera lens.

I was going to suggest this picture as my characteristic pose, with my characteristic nose. I look worried, but I wasn’t. Here’s another nose picture, because I figured you would want one. Possibly a bit too avant-garde for some, I know.

It was a partly-gloomy day today. In fact our side of the city was especially gloomy, owing to a big mountain wave-type cloud.Out east, the sky was blue. This is looking northeast. It was kind of on and off all day long. Sometimes gloomy, sometimes sunny.You can see the Snowdrop Frame there, covered with plastic. Not exactly a charming effect in the garden, but the guy I live with doesn’t hugely care. The little fence is temporary, by the way.

The path does look better with the new gravel spread on it. And maybe it will be less muddy in winter. This is assuming that it ever rains or snows again. Right now it doesn’t seem like it will.A couple of plants are still flowering. This is Sphaeralcea munroana. The guy I live with said that was nice, but he was a lot more interested in other things. Not only are there snowdrops up, one is flowering.

Galanthus reginae-olgae.

There are some other early-flowering snowdrops poking their noses out of the ground, too.So now there is all this talk about snowdrops. I have to listen to it; you’re lucky that you don’t. I didn’t realize there were feathers in this picture until just now. I prefer not to say why there are feathers all over the place.

Some people don’t believe that the gardening year here starts in late September, but it really does. We tend not to do much of anything during the summer, and the hail can be very disheartening. It didn’t used to be this way, no matter what people claim, but now it’s gotten so bad that the guy I live with said he thought it was pointless to risk having a garden full of flowers in June, July, and August, only to have it obliterated by hail. So the guy I live with mostly just putters in the garden during that season, and complains about the lack of sun.

Once the autumn crocuses start to flower (they’d really like a lot more rain than they get here; the guy I live with waters when I’m at Day Care), things perk up around here.

The cyclamen have nice flowers, but you mostly grow them for the leaves, which stay attractive all winter. Very cold temperatures and lack of snow cover will spoil some of the leaves, but the cyclamen here are growing in places where if it snows, there will be some snow cover if the temperature drops a lot. Like in shade.

These are Cyclamen hederifolium. You can see some coiled seed heads, too.  I forgot to show pictures of the leaves in another part of the garden, but I can leave (sorry) that for another post. There are also some nice Cyclamen confusum and C. mirabile.

The guy I live with spent some time taking books out of the bookcases in the living room, the other day, and replacing them with books he liked. It was very traumatic for him to do this; most of the books were his wife’s; too big for the bookcases, lying on their sides, and so those are going to be donated to the local library. I might show a picture of the way the bookcases look now in another post.

That’s pretty much all I have for today. I’ll leave you with an atmospheric picture of me sleeping cozily in the upstairs bedroom, with a candle, and my internet radio. 

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 totally up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Another New Toy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. As you can see, my life can sometimes verge on the extremely rough. I didn’t have a pillow. Well, it snowed here. It wasn’t a lot of snow but it did get cold enough that a lot of trees and shrubs will have brown or dried-up leaves this autumn, instead of color. That does happen here sometimes. There weren’t all that many leaves anyway, because of the hail in August.

One strange thing when it was all gloomy (even gloomier than the last four months have been), and about to snow was that the clock radio picked up the local classical music station. It had stopped doing that for some reason. The guy I live with said that when dogs are left home alone, they like to have the radio on, especially if the radio was always on when they were left alone. It felt unpleasant to have a bunch of static coming from the clock radio. And so the guy I live with splurged a bit and bought an internet radio, and now everything comes in crystal clear. I can even listen to the BBC if I want to.

It snowed, and then it warmed up right away. The sun even came out. The guy I live with said he wasn’t sure what to do.

Of course he got over it when the crocuses began to flower the day after it snowed. These are Crocus speciosus, the easiest to grow and possibly most beautiful of all the autumn-flowering crocuses. They have seeded all over the garden. 

The white form of Crocus speciosus. (This picture was taken with the point-and-shoot; the rest were taken with the “big camera’).Crocus pulchellus. This is a form called ‘Inspiration’. And Crocus hadriaticus ‘Annabelle’. This has slightly larger flowers than regular hadriaticus. That is saffron there, but not the best quality. That comes from the saffron crocus, C. sativus. The guy I live with says that our gardening year really begins at this time of year, which a lot of people find very odd (one reason why he says it). There are a lot fewer storms at this time of year, and so things are calmer, both outside and in.

It’s not supposed to be below freezing for at least a week now. The last shipment of bulbs arrived last week, and all of them have been potted up (the English would say “potted on”, I guess) and are snug in the large bulb frame.The idea here is that since the bulbs arrived a bit late in the year, they might have trouble growing roots into the surrounding soil if they were planted directly into the garden. The frame is covered with two layers of opaque plastic so it doesn’t get so terribly cold inside the frame. You can see that one colchicum is sort of flowering now.

The guy I live with has been moping quite a bit, lately. His mom’s house is mostly empty now, and people are looking at it, maybe going to buy it, and that makes him feel very odd. Soon it won’t be a place for him to go to, any more.

He found this book at his mom’s house. He never read it, and said he was not going to read it to me. 

He gets sad sometimes, these days, and maybe the inscription inside will show why.He said this is the way it goes when you find things in a house that never used to be empty.

In other news, we’ve been working on me sleeping in the bed at night. There was one night when I didn’t want to get into my upstairs fort at bedtime, I forget why, and so the guy I live with said there was plenty of room on the bed, and we purebred border collies are generally very clean, so I tried it. The first couple of nights were a bit difficult for me, but now I’ve gotten used to it, I think; it is very pleasant to sleep in the bed in the cozy upstairs bedroom.

A few nights ago we both fell asleep on the bed before official bed time, and then the guy I live with got me up for Tinkle Time, about a quarter to one in the morning, and I went out, and came back in, and the guy I live with said I had been sprayed and I had to go into the bathtub and be shampooed. That wasn’t a whole lot of fun. There was a striped kitty in the yard next to ours, so I didn’t get totally sprayed, the way you can get.

We’ve been looking for the muskrat, too. The guy I live with said we had seen it nine times, as we walked along the canal road, but he never could get the camera out in time.

This is me, looking for the muskrat. Its house is on the opposite bank of the canal, right across from where I’m standing. You can sort of see where it is. Kind of like beach front property.

We would just see ripples like this.On our walk this morning I disturbed a really big hawk. This afternoon, finally, we did see the muskrat, and there are pictures to prove it. You can see its head there, if you really look. 

That’s about all I have for today. 

Until next time, then.