Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to complain about the weather. You may remember me from such spring-related posts as “Sunless Spring”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m getting ready for a day of gardening, if you couldn’t tell.
The weather here has been, in the words of the guy I live with, “nightmarish”, with wind almost every day. Not just breezes, but wind. The forecast this week calls for wind, wind, wind, wind, wind, and more wind.
If you look at my previous posts done in May, you’ll notice the word “rain” over and over again, but not this year.
Despite all this, the guy I live with went with his friend to the plant sale at the botanic gardens. He wasn’t going to buy much, since he’s been pretty discouraged lately, but he is a gardener, so he couldn’t help himself.
Nolinas, hesperaloes, dasylirions, yuccas, and a couple of plants of hardy rosemary.
I have some pictures of plants flowering in the garden here, but I should say beforehand that some of these aren’t quite in focus. The guy I live with blames the wind, of course.
When the wind isn’t blowing, the whole garden is scented with the strong smell of cloves from Ribes aureum.
Mahonia (or Berberis if you insist) fremontii is in bud.
And in the shade garden, there’s Anemone nemorosa ‘Vestal’. He got this from a friend about thirty years ago.
There are a couple other forms of this anemone in the shade garden, too.
The other day we had a visitor, who wanted to look at the purple-leaved Prunus andersonii, because people might want to take cuttings of this to introduce it into the trade.
I guess it has some Prunus × cistena (purple-leaved sand cherry) genes in it.
So that was fun. I got to show our visitor all around the garden.
And something else. Another one of those objects of mystery. We were just walking along the canal road by the old sluice.
I think I mentioned in an earlier post that there used to be an iron wheel that fit into the threads on top of the gate, but apparently someone swiped it. There used to be a farmhouse some distance to the north of the sluice.
(There’s another sluice a little bit to the west of this one, too.)
We came upon the object, or objects, of mystery.
We pondered this for a while, and then went to see if there were any trout in the canal. There weren’t any; maybe it’s too early to see them.
You can see that the water slows a bit at this bend; this is usually where we see trout. And not little trout, either.
That’s how our spring is going, thus far. (I’ve always wanted to say “thus far”.) Lots of wind, no rain, and no trout.
Until next time, then.