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 our very modern lifestyle. You may remember me from such change-related posts as “Another Change”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I really like lying on this rug, which may not be the cleanest rug in the world, though it does periodically get washed by rain and then sort of hung out to dry. The garden doesn’t look too horrible so long as you don’t look too closely and see all the shredded leaves. There are lots of cow-pen daisies and Aster oblongifolius flowering right in front of where I’m standing and surveying. The “old rock garden” looks okay. The view along the north path looks the same. The guy I live with keeps saying he’s going to get more gravel for the path but so far he hasn’t done it. Out in the “way back” the cow-pen daisies (Verbesina encelioides) are flowering, too. They’re the only plants flowering there.

The really big change here is that the guy I live with’s mom died this week. He thought about this happening for a few years now, and figured he would be able to deal with it at least a little, since she was approaching ninety (this coming Halloween), but he’s been having a very hard time with this.

He brought home some watercolors and other paintings from his mom’s house. One of them was a watercolor done by his grandfather of the “way back” in his garden in Los Angeles. Looking west. (The windows next to the telephone pole are of the Dover Hotel, which is still there and looks the same. The apartment house in the background is still there, too.) It took him a long time to realize there was a “way back” in the garden here, too, bordered by a hedge, with a shed sort of at one end. The other thing, which in its way is kind of big, is that there’s a new bed in the upstairs bedroom. Really just a mattress and foundation. It’s a lot higher than the ancient one that was there, and I was very surprised when I tried to get up on it the first time. Of course I can just leap up on it effortlessly, now, but he said when I get older he’ll put a cushion or something next to the bed so I can get up there.It turns out that I can see more of what’s happening on the street now. And sleeping on a new mattress with a soft Pottery Barn mattress pad and sheet isn’t too bad at all.

Back to the garden for a minute, here’s Colchicum ‘Innocence’ flowering in the garden on the north side of the house. There are more plants on the other side of the garden, but the flowers aren’t up yet. And Colchicum montanum, new from Odyssey Bulbs this year. It used to be called Merendera montana. Some Cyclamen hederifolium and colchicums flowering in the little bed just off the patio, among the lamium and violets. The guy I live with says not to walk through there but I still do. There are snakes to hunt, under the birch on the left.And a chrysanthemum, in the pot that had a tomato plant. He said “One does want a hint of color”. I didn’t get it. I guess that’s all. We did a little bit of gardening today, and he said maybe we’ll do some more, when things settle down a bit. I’ll leave you with a picture of me walking along the canal road, which hasn’t been mowed at all this year.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to talk about this and that and other things. You may remember me from such posts as “A Hint Of Rain” and “Lavender And Ice Cubes”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I was being bothered by flying things.I really dislike having things fly around me, and land on me, and then start crawling all over me. The guy I live with said I was lucky not to live in a warmer climate, where extremely large flying things might land on me, or even bite me. I think these things were gnats.

Not much is happening around here. The guy I live with said someone is coming to look at the roof next week and that we’ll almost certainly get a new one. He wasn’t going to get one and then realized (he can be slow sometimes) that if he didn’t, he would constantly worry about the roof until we did eventually get a new one.

Because, of course, he was worried about the roof before this summer. Then we had the two hailstorms and I guess that was the deciding factor. Otherwise he would just sit and worry. He worries a lot, as I’ve said before, and he probably didn’t need this extra, and very major, thing.

Well, so, anyway, some things are actually happening here. Little things, but still things. The cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium) began to flower after they were watered a few days ago.

You can see that there was some sun in the garden this morning, when the pictures were taken.

A highly illegal entrance-way was also discovered. The guy I live with said “Someone has been digging under the fence.” I couldn’t help but admire his powers of observation. There was sun on my walk this morning. You may have heard that I hurt my leg, my left hind leg, and that I was seriously limping, but it got better. I had to have what I thought was an excessively large amount of “quiet time” for a few days. The guy I live with called my doctor to see if I could go to Day Care this week, and the thought was I should stay home, and “play it safe”, but the whole time he was talking on the phone I was chasing squirrels in the garden, and he felt very weird about me not going, and his inability to make decisions, but he said what I felt about things was more important than him trying to make decisions, and that me chasing squirrels and running up and down and back and forth was a good sign, so he called again the next day, and it was decided that I could go to Day Care, which I did. My leg is fine now. Yesterday, and also this morning, the water in the canal was mysteriously low (and at normal height, or depth, in the evening). There were very interesting things to see in the water.

The guy I live with said these were pretty big trout, and there were a lot of them.

We didn’t look to see if there were any giant crawdads, but we did see the muskrat, paddling happily down the shallow water. The guy I live with didn’t have his camera ready. Naturally.

Around about noon the sky turned the way it has almost every day since maybe May. It was extremely dark for the rest of the day and was accompanied by a considerable amount of complaining.When this picture was taken it was ninety degrees Fahrenheit (a little over thirty-two Celsius), sixteen percent humidity, and not a breath of air moving. He said he thought he might go completely crazy.

If there aren’t storms, then there is no wind, for days on end. Denver used to be a famously windy place, but not any more. The air just sits there. The guy I live with said it’s probably the same air every single day and that if we breathed too much it might not have much oxygen after a while. There aren’t a lot of leaves on many of the plants to help with the oxygen.

You can see the pathetic eggplant plant is flowering, but we don’t have much hope for eggplants. The guy I live with said it was only for ornament anyway, because eggplant, except for the green Thai eggplants, isn’t eaten here very much. At least the eggplant plant wasn’t in a place where its leaves got totally shredded, like what happened to the tomato plants. Some watering has been done, but not nearly enough. It rained today; about a hundred drops. Several years ago the guy I live with planted some Salvia darcyi in the front bed, under the upstairs bedroom window, in the only part of the front yard that’s ever watered, and they get watered fairly often (like once every two weeks), because they need water in order to flower. The important thing here isn’t the flowers, really, because the plants become a bit unattractive in the later stage of flowering, but the visitors. Maybe you can see the visitor, here, sitting on one of the wire cages set there to keep rabbits from eating everything. I guess that’s all for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me in repose, after a long day of being me. 

Until next time, then.