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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden, and some other stuff, too. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cow-Pen Daisies”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.It’s been extremely hot. The sun has been out, which is weird, with the humidity lower than fifteen percent for days now. The guy I live with left me alone (not for very long) every day for a week, I think, though he’s stayed home the last couple of days. He said he was waiting for something to come in the mail.

When he’s been at home he was one the phone so much that he had to change the plan on his cell phone to add more minutes. I wondered why he didn’t talk on the land line instead, but he didn’t.

All of this has to do with him losing his mom, of course.

One thing that he said which I guess I understand, since I haven’t seen my mom in a very long time, was how a lot of links to the past have been broken now; his life in Los Angeles in the 1950s seems like an illusion. There is no one to talk to about that period in his life. I guess this is the way things go.

Here he is, with his mom behind him, maybe about 1954, in Los Angeles. Sort of gardening.He said this picture of the tree made it look less full than he imagined it. This is the front of his grandparents’ house in Los Angeles. The house is gone now, but a lot of the houses in the neighborhood are still there. His grandfather was in the Army and liked to fly this huge flag. The back yard.What really surprised him was how little he wanted from his mom’s house. He did take two watercolors his grandfather did; they’re copies of paintings by other artists which he did in 1933. The guy I live with said he has remembered these two watercolors ever since he was conscious. You can see one of the Fu dogs there, too. He’s had those for a while now.Since I’m talking about the past, I might as well mention the lamp you can see. That was at his paternal grandmother’s house in east Denver, and when there was an infestation of miller moths a lot of them would get caught in that bowl thing and cook. The guy I live with said the smell was something else. We don’t have that many miller moths here. (It’s funny because his grandmother’s maiden name was Miller and as a kid he thought the moths were named after her, and though he later knew that wasn’t true, it was only in the last few years that he realized they were called “millers” because they look like they’re covered with flour, like a miller would be.)

Now back to gardening. You can see here that we had sun yesterday. This was on my walk.Today they said “sun”, but this was what we got instead. It rained. The guy I live with said not to laugh. We had some actual rain about a week ago, maybe half an inch over two days, and now the sternbergias are flowering. The last time they flowered was October of 2000. There must be some relationship between getting rain at just the right time and the flowering.  You can also see bindweed; no one has been weeding here lately. The bigger leaves are from Lonicera olgae, from Central Asia. A miniature honeysuckle.There are cyclamen flowering. This is Cyclamen purpurascens ‘Extra Fancy’, which is almost finished flowering.Cyclamen cilicium. A nice form of Cyclamen hederifolium in the middle of the picture. The point-and-shoot adds too much blue to pinks, and the guy I live with doesn’t know how to fix that. (Except by using the “big camera”.) And there are colchicums. The guy I live with said he didn’t know which one this was because a Certain Partly, “who shall be nameless”, stole all the labels when he was a puppy. I don’t remember doing anything like that, but he did look right at me when he said that.

This one is Colchicum cilicicum. He gets “cilicium” and “cilicicum” confused sometimes. Both names refer to ancient Cilicia, an area in southern Turkey. He got some new colchicums, from Daffodils and More, last weekend. They were starting to flower, which is okay. When he planted them he didn’t cover over the flowering stalks, like they were in a sort of depression, so that when the stalks wither he can cover them and the corms will be a bit deeper that way. He said you do the same thing with crocosmias, which we don’t grow here, but his friend does, in her garden.

That cage you see is for a little oak, to keep bunnies from nibbling on it.

There are some cow-pen daisies (Verbesina encelioides) in the “way back” too. They needed to be watered a little.More in the lawn, with Aster oblongifolius. None of these were planted here; they all seeded themselves.I guess that’s it for today.

Until next time, then.