the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden, and also on all the stuff the guy I live with has been doing and thinking, which I know you will find as utterly fascinating as I have. You may remember me from such posts as “Mice In The Rice”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Ready for my evening walk.The weather here, according to the guy I live with anyway, has been dreadful. “As usual”, he said. It’s true that it’s been incredibly gloomy, even more so than it has been, and we’ve had some mist and drizzle, which is not our typical weather at all. It’s even supposed to snow tomorrow.

You may be able to imagine what was said when the forecast mentioned snow. We’ve had so little rain, and way too much hail, and hardly any sun, since May, and now it’s going to snow. There’s not supposed to be much snow, though.

He took some pictures of the garden today, featuring me, in the gloom. It was pretty chilly, too. This is me, looking at something. Here I am hot on the trail of something. It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you have a magnificently white-tipped tail. The guy I live with is pretty jealous, I’m sure. Here I am, looking for something else. There are always things to look for in our garden. I often don’t find what I think I’m looking for. The guy I live with says that’s a metaphor. A couple of days ago there was a little bit of sun and the guy I live with took some pictures of the crocuses and cyclamen which were flowering.

This is Crocus pallasii subsp. turcicus. And Crocus hadriaticus forma lilacinus. They start out white and get more lilac as they age.Here’s Crocus niveus. The specific epithet means “snow white” or “snowy”. The story goes that E.A. Bowles described the species from plants he either saw in Greece or cultivated in his garden at Myddleton House from seed or corms he collected in Greece, but he only saw pure white forms, when in fact as you can see they can have a light purplish tinge, and so thought niveus was a good name.

The guy I live with said it isn’t like that was the only time someone described a species based on an attribute which seemed unique and then later more examples of the species showed that that attribute was more variable than previously thought. Here’s a Cyclamen hederifolium which has been flowering for over a month. The picture isn’t really hugely in focus but the guy I live with was fiddling around with a lens he doesn’t use very often. He should have used a tripod, I think.I’m going to change the subject a bit, now, because I haven’t posted for a while, and there’s a reason for that. The guy I live with has been filling out forms and looking at documents and thinking about things, because his mom died last month.

The guy I live with has been reading, or really skimming through, a bunch of letters which his grandfather saved. His mom saved them too. They were both savers of things. The guy I live with did not save them.

But some of the letters dealt with subjects which were very traumatic for the family, when he was very little, and that made him sad.

His sister brought over some pictures, which he took pictures of, instead of scanning them, which he could have done, but didn’t, since taking pictures of pictures seemed easier, though they came out less focused than they could have.

Here’s a picture of the guy I live with, and his father, at his maternal grandparents’ house in Los Angeles, in 1955.  Maybe you can see the brace on his father’s right foot, and the way his right hand was curled. He had been wounded in Korea three years before. The guy I live with always thought this was just the way things were, and all his life, when he encountered people with differences like this he figured that this was the way things were. Of course all of this was massively upsetting to everyone in the family, but the guy I live with, who didn’t remember his father before he was wounded (a word he’s very tired of hearing now, so many years later), always thought of his father as his father, and that was all.

Here’s the guy I live with, watching the gardener, whose name was Harry, hosing down the sidewalk in Los Angeles, which is something they did, back then. Harry was from the Philippines. Like the rattan furniture in the first picture. This is the car the guy I live with’s parents had, in 1955. It was hard for me to believe that they had cars that long ago, but I guess they did.And this is the car the guy I live with’s mom got (his father didn’t drive) in 1957. It has push-button transmission. He said one time his mom took him to Hody’s in Long Beach and got him a milk shake, which he spilled down the back seat of the car, and his mom was really mad. I sometimes do things like that and the guy I live with gets mad at me, but only for a little while. He does things like that almost every day. That’s him in the car window there. The car was really tomato-colored and gray, but the picture is really old. Really, really old.

I mean, one of the letters he read was from his great uncle to his grandfather, talking about their oldest brother, who lived in Newport, Rhode Island, where they were all born, and there was talk about the latest thing, television, and how the oldest brother didn’t want a television set .

If you look at the background in all these pictures you can see the topiary which was across the street from his grandparent’s house. The guy I live with learned about topiary way back when. Maybe it wasn’t so much topiary as just trimmed that way, but he gave the various shapes different names.

So, anyway. The only other thing I have has to do with the ducks, but I forget how many ducklings there were this year. Let’s say there were four. Four is a good number. Today is the guy I live with’s late wife’s birthday, the tenth one since she died, and it’s been a bit rough for him, so he wants me to say there were four ducklings to begin with, as well, not more, because neither of us remember how many ducklings there were, and I guess we both just want it to be four. There certainly weren’t less than four. You can see two of them, but I don’t know which two, in this picture, with their companions. There are eight ducks in the canal here. Each duckling grew up, met someone, and now they paddle happily in the canal. There’s a muskrat, too, but it dives underwater when we walk anywhere near it.

That really is all I have for today. I guess you’ll hear about it if it does snow. 

Until next time, then.

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 news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Autumnal Equinox”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.The south path, that is to say the path on the south side of the garden, is pretty messy because of the locust pods dropping onto it, and the husks of thistle seed, too. A lot of thistle seed has been eaten here in the last month or so.

You may be able to see the teensy change in the garden in that picture, or in this one.No? Well, try this one, with the garden illuminated by the late afternoon sun. You see the dark spot beneath the fence post? That’s a new plant, a Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’. A purple smoke bush. It’s there to “break up the monotony of all the gray and silver leaves”. I guess it does that. Not a whole lot of gardening has been done here, except for getting and planting the smoke bush, which was on sale, because the guy I live with has been on the phone a lot, and is pretty stressed out. He does pretty well with stress; his last job was stressful and so all this being on the phone is like that.

There’s one sternbergia flowering; maybe Sternbergia sicula (which may be the same as S. lutea). How it got where it is in the garden, no one knows. There were some flowering elsewhere in the garden but they really need more rain than we get in order to flower. Or a lot of watering. The others are in one of the rock gardens; the tufts of green leaves in the upper middle part of the picture. You may notice that this rock garden doesn’t have a lot of rock garden plants in it. It used to, but when they died, the plants weren’t replaced. Kind of minimalist, I guess.

Like the bed against the west side of the house. I wonder if a lot of the garden isn’t going to go this way.Obviously the “lawn” is just the opposite, but it’s mostly annuals and plants that have seeded there. A few crocuses have come up among all the other plants. They might be hard to see in the picture above, so here’s a sort of close up.

More crocuses in the rock garden called “Mount Zot”, for reasons I don’t understand. The guy I live with says it was an old joke that everyone has forgotten. These are Crocus kotschyanus ‘Reliant’ (or ‘Reliance’), the earliest one here. There was a stick in the way, in the picture above. The crocus has seeded around a bit, too. The little pine is Pinus strobiformis ‘Coronado’, with a little upright Irish yew (Taxus baccata ‘Fastigiata’) next to it, and a bird’s nest spruce at the bottom. Some of the new colchicums are still flowering. This one is ‘Beaconsfield’. The label says so. The zauschnerias here were badly battered by the hail, but ‘Etteri’ came back, to flower just in time to see the last of the hummingbirds fly south. They aren’t frightened by the French Scare Cats. I think yesterday or the day before was the last time we saw a hummingbird here. It’s kind of sad. Some gravel got spread on the north path while I was at Day Care playing with my friends. I think I know who had the better time that day.The path is now super-gravely, but water from rain and melting snow collects here and makes the path all muddy. The guy I live with suggested that if I wouldn’t run back and forth on the path chasing squirrels maybe some of the gravel would stay put, but chasing squirrels is excellent fun.

Oh. Here I am going on, and I haven’t said anything about the title of today’s post. Well, the guy I live with snickered when he saw the forecast for tomorrow morning. “A chance of drizzle”. He doesn’t snicker very often, but he did then. I guess it’s almost like having a chance of effelants coming into the garden. We don’t get much drizzle. The garden is so dry, it’s dry. A lot of watering was done, with the sprinkler, while the gravel was being spread.

Ours isn’t really a watered garden in the sense that most gardens around here are. It used to be, but not any more. Now the watering is more to make up for lack of rain in what were considered more or less “normal” years back in the last century. Like when it rained in September and October, which it rarely does now. So we don’t grow many plants native to what we would call “rainy climates”.

The guy I live with enjoys visiting watered gardens, especially with his friend, but that style of gardening isn’t for us, these days.

I guess he’s pretty sad right now, what with losing his mom, and last Tuesday was his wedding anniversary, the tenth one without his wife. How time flies. He said his wife would have really loved me, because she loved purebred border collies, especially excellent ones, and so that’s the main reason why I get to go to Day Care, to kind of make up for that loss.

And then there’s the Effelant Box, a small box made from some tropical hardwood, with, as you can see, effelants on it. It’s really old, needs a bit of cleaning, and he said he didn’t want to know what the effelants were made out of. He remembers the box from when he was little. It came from his mom’s house. At least these effelants won’t invade our garden.

Well, that’s all that I have for today. On my evening walk, the guy I live with said that the ducks were bedding down for the night. I felt kind of sorry for them because they didn’t have cozy forts to sleep in at night, but the guy I live with said they were ducks, and that’s how ducks sleep. They paddle in the canal during the day, and I take naps on soft Pottery Barn sheets which aren’t the most expensive ones you can get, so I guess that’s a trade off. You can see, though, that the ducks were alert when we walked by. I’ll leave you with a picture of me walking the other way on the canal road, just this morning.

Until next time, then.