the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, Mani the Sprechhund, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Stuff You Didn’t Know”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Maybe you notice what’s happened since the last time I posted. Another new fence. Or I should say another replacement fence, to replace something which was very ugly. (It may look like it slants down to the right, in the picture, but it is totally level.) Another section needs to be added to the right of the one you see there, so that the little garden called “The Enclosure” is really enclosed, at least on three sides. I guess when that fence gets built, which might be pretty soon, I can tell the story of that garden, though it’s probably been told two or three times already.

So all of a sudden it’s May. I guess this is not the guy I live with’s favorite month. And the thunderstorm warnings have started. This was taken looking northeast, yesterday, when it wasn’t May.The guy I live with hates thunderstorms. I feel the same way. He said that if we won the lottery we might move to a place where they don’t have thunderstorms, and just while away the while pleasantly, instead of cowering in terror for four straight months, the way it can be here some summers.

At least he doesn’t work any more. There are of course some things about working that were good, but being separated from home when there was a bad storm here, and he was working, was not a good thing, and that anxiety still surfaces from time to time.

So far nothing has happened, weather-wise, so I thought I would show some pictures of flowers.  A couple of these were posted on Facebook but will look better here.

This is Gentiana verna, which was grown from seed, and has been in the trough for many years. It even reseeds into the trough. The plant was bigger but a large section was accidentally pulled out some years ago during an episode of frenzied weeding. This colony of Fritillaria pallidiflora was started from a few plants grown from seed, years ago. The bulbs have produced a lot of seed; there are even more plants than you can see here. It is kind of amazing that this happened, since so many other attempts at growing bulbs from seed have been spectacular failures. It’s been a variable year, I guess you would say, for the Juno irises. Some flowered last month, some got frozen, and some didn’t flower at all because it got too cold right as the buds were forming. But Iris bucharica, which is one of the easiest, is having a very good year.

These have been in the garden for a very long time, but were dug up and replanted a couple of years ago. That seemed to do them some good. The bulbs, which have long fleshy roots attached to them, are pretty deep in the ground.

Iris magnifica, which is another Juno type, is “new at the zoo” this year, from Odyssey Bulbs. Now, as you may know, we purebred border collies are not allowed to drive cars. This is partly because we never get issued driver’s licenses, but mostly because we can’t see red. Like for stop signs and stop lights. This is what the guy I live with says, anyway. In other words I’m not much into red flowers.

There are several red tulips flowering in the garden, or so I’m told. This is Tulipa butkovii, one of the reddest. Also one of the hugest. When fully opened the flowers can be six inches (fifteen centimeters) across. 

The guy I live with has been alternating between “The Big Bang Theory” (obviously) and “Midsomer Murders”; the shows are on the TV but he doesn’t really sit down and watch them. They’re just on. And then get replayed all the time.

I mention this because I’ve kind of been going on, without explaining the Sprechhund business. In one of the episodes of “Midsomer Murders” it’s said that Sykes, the star of the show, really, is a Sprechhund, which is German for “a dog you talk to”.

The guy I live with said that wasn’t German, only sounded like it, but I am a dog that he talks to, and talks to a lot. Like on our walks and pretty much all day long. He says this and he says that. Then he says more things.

I talk, too. I know you know that if you’ve been reading the blog for a while. Just yesterday I had a whole bunch to say while the guy I live with was on the phone and the person on the other end could hear all the things I had to say. I got shushed more than once, but kept on talking.

I could go on and on about myself but maybe it’s time to wind up this post. I’ll leave you with another picture of me in the garden, carefully guarding everything, and not worrying about thunder. 

Until next time, then.

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 right up to date on the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “A Bit Chilly”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. This is my interpretation of how things have been going lately. Just like the post I mentioned, from last year, it’s been chilly and not very pleasant here lately. “Snowing way too much”, according to someone I know. 

The muskrat is back; the guy I live with said it seemed bigger than last year. I looked for it but couldn’t find it. Maybe on another walk. I looked for voles too, but I think it was too cold for them to poke their heads above ground. The wild plums are flowering. The guy I live with said that back in the last century they were a sign of spring along the Front Range, but the last few Aprils have been so cold that you can hardly ever smell them. Here they are, along the canal road. I was ready to keep going but the plums needed to have their picture taken. The guy I live with said the plums make a really good jam, but he’s never made jam. Just eaten it. It’s best on toast with lots of butter. So much butter that it gets the toast soggy before you spread the jam on it. The sun hasn’t been out much, lately. It came out later today, and we could really smell the plums when we got close to them.

There’s a “weird tulip” flowering in the front yard.About twenty-five years ago a bunch of ‘Queen of the Night’ tulips were planted in the front yard (along with the orange ‘Dillenburg’ which everyone said to plant with it), and this is what had become of them.

Today an order of plants arrived, from Edelweiss Perennials. Mostly cyclamen. The guy I live with was very happy to get them. He likes cyclamen a lot, if you didn’t know. There were some other plants, too.The box came right in the middle of a big project, so we took some time out to look at the plants and water them.

Remember this fence? Hideous, isn’t it? (Ignoring the equally-unattractive bamboo fence behind it, I mean.) This was the big project today. There was a lot of hemming and hawing about the fence after it was put up. Most of the materials were already here so it didn’t cost much money at all, but it was really, really ugly. It was necessary to have a little fence here to mark the end of the sand pile and sort of wall off the little corner in the northwestern part of the garden, but doing it with an ugly fence didn’t seem right.

Last weekend the guy I live with went to Denver Botanic Gardens and walked around the gardens with his friends, while it was snowing. He remembered the fences around the Bill Hosokawa Pavilion, a Japanese-style garden with bonsai in a greenhouse, and really handsome fences and paving, and this week he went and bought some lumber to make his version of the fences.

At first he had the idea that he would use cedar, and then when he looked at the various wood that was available there was oak, but all of these were sold by the linear foot, so he settled on pine. Much, much cheaper.

It might need to be stained later, so it hasn’t been thoroughly fastened to the uprights.

And you can see through it.

So we have a new fence. At least the other one wasn’t there for very long.

That’s all I have for now. Maybe things will get busier soon, but that all depends on the weather. I do know what to do when it gets chilly, though.

Until next time, then.