the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you our latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “Nature Is Icky”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m looking at bees, if you were wondering. There are zillions of bees on the flowers of Sedum ‘Matrona’.
I eat bees, even though the guy I live with says not to. I think that’s because he’s never tried them.
Really, though, bees and wasps and yellowjackets are scary, and I eat them to keep them from stinging me. That may sound odd to you, but I don’t think it is, though the guy I live with calls reasoning like that “border collie logic”.

As promised, I have some pictures of colchicums today.

Colchicum autumnale ‘Nancy Lindsay’ again.

‘Rosy Dawn’

‘World Champion’s Cup’

Colchicum laetum, a smallish species found in southern Russia.

Colchicum x agrippinum

Those are the colchicums for today. That last one takes the cake for tesselation, doesn’t it?
There is another tesselated one that I hope to show soon.

So today I was left alone to my own devices (that is, I slept) while the guy I live with went to a plant sale not far from here, to a big public garden next to Kendrick Lake.
He only bought three plants, and didn’t wander around the garden like he thought he would, because he’d spent too much time there and wanted to come home to see me.

But he saw this, and he said it made him “blue with envy”.
This is Salvia azurea. If you’ve read Claude Barr’s Jewels of the Plains he mentions this, and S. pitcheri, which is now considered the same as S. azurea.
Barr says that the salvia has very deep roots that search for water, and will survive drought, but won’t flower in autumn unless it rains.
This garden is watered quite a bit, and though the guy I live with has a plant of this in the garden, he said he wanted it to be as big as this one, so he’s going to water more.
(By the way, if you do an internet search on “do roots search for water” there are quite a few websites that say they don’t. They do; it’s called hydrotropism.)

And that’s all I have for today. I was hoping this post would be more about me, but the guy I live with assured me that a post mostly featuring me might come in the near future.

Until next time.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you up to date on all the possibly less-than-exciting events in our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “My New Toy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Looking at the greenness, you wouldn’t know how dry it is here, but let me tell you, it’s really dry. We’ve had about an inch (2.5cm) of rain since the first of July.
The guy I live with said if I looked back at blog posts done at this time of year there would be complaining about how dry it was and how it might never rain again, and you would think he would have become accustomed to this, but he says this drought is “anxiety-inducing”, and I happen to know that’s a subject he knows a lot about.

He also knows a lot about being irritated, and one especially irritating thing for him was the discovery that NOAA said this was the “third wettest August” in Denver history. He had no idea why they said that, because that’s not reflected on the CoCoRaHS database, but it turns out that these measurements were taken at the airport, which is thirty-three miles (53km) east of here.
It rains more out there. We got more snow and rain than “out there” up until June, but now the situation is reversed.

So the guy I live with has been watering, with some positive results.
Salvia darcyi is finally starting to flower, and maybe the last of the hummingbirds will notice it.
The guy I live with says this salvia is about as drought-tolerant as a tomato plant, but he still likes it a lot. He planted five plants in the front garden, which was a mistake, considering how wilty they get when the soil is dry.
The amount of water needed to keep those leaves turgid is considerable, though of course not if it gets the amount of rain it gets in its native habitat, 3.26 inches (82.9mm) in September, and since it grows in rocky soil in real life, all that rain goes right to the roots.

This is ‘Windwalker’ again, which is a cross between darcyi and Salvia greggii. (The latter is much more tolerant of dry soil, but won’t flower in late summer if it doesn’t rain or get irrigation.)
You can see the leaves are smaller, so less hydration is needed, but it still needed watering to get it to flower.

In other news, the first cyclamen are flowering. These are Cyclamen hederifolium; they flower without leaves, at first. This is called hysteranthy.
(I thought showing a picture of this growing with Hedera helix was a bit heavy-handed. The ivy is a cultivar called ‘Baltica’.)
Cyclamen purpurascens is flowering, too. This flowers with the leaves emerging at the same time; this is called synanthy.
This is a selection called ‘Extra Fancy’, because of the leaves.
In rainier climates this species will have green leaves all summer, but not here.

And there are some colchicums. These are all hysteranthous; the leaves appear in the spring.
This is Colchicum autumnale ‘Nancy Lindsay’.
The guy I live with got this as Colchicum atropurpureum ‘Drake’s Variety’, but there’s no such thing, and he thinks this looks more like one called ‘Disraeli’.
That cultivar is known for its tesselation, or a sort of checkerboard pattern, which you can see.
And Colchicum kotschyi, from Iran.
Rest assured there will be more pictures of colchicums in future posts. There are a lot of colchicums in our garden, and I do mean a lot.

I’m pretty sure that’s all I have for today. I suspect I’m going to have to listen to a lot of complaints about the lack of rain, especially when rain is predicted and never arrives, which happens a lot, but I’ll manage.

Until next time, then.