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 to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden and its environs. It was Chess who first used that word, but I’ve used it more. You may remember me from such “environs”-using posts as “Escape Claws”, among at least one other.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I think you can see what happened last night. Before it snowed there were some things in flower which got their pictures taken. The iris, Iris rosenbachiana ‘Tovilj Dara’ is always photogenic.I don’t know if I’ve said this but there are some juno irises which are easy, like Iris bucharica and aucheri, some which are difficult to grow but you can’t get them anyway so it hardly matters, and some which are easy if you plant them in just the right place but now you can’t get these either.

This one, with a lot of other junos, is growing on a little hill in the “way back” next to the Employees Only section, in a location where it doesn’t get much sun until early March. Iris rosenbachiana used to come up in January here, and that was the end of that. I don’t think I need to say why. Not all bulbs are tough like snowdrops.

Apparently some people, like botanists, think this is really Iris nicolai or Iris popovii. The junos are really cool; I did a post on them a while back called “Day Of The Scorpiris”. But you do have to make sure that the ones that like to come up very early don’t.

There are lots of cyclamen in flower here now. Cyclamen coum. They’re actually about three weeks late because the soil froze. Now it’s thawed out and everything seems fine. On our walk the other morning there was a lot of barking at something from across the field and we looked and this is what we saw. The barking was coming from off to the right in this picture, from a yard you can’t see. The coyote watched us (me, really; I’m the deadly threat, of course), then turned around and went home. The guy I live with said he felt sorry for it. He knew exactly what it was like to want to do something but feel too shy or awkward to do it. He told me he’d only been to a restaurant all by himself maybe three times in his life, and all of those times in the last nine years.

Today the coyote came back. The dial on the camera had been turned too far so the pictures are dark, but you get the idea.

I got to run back and forth in the mud, which was fun, except then the guy I live with said to look at my feet, which I did.Some work, of an unknown kind, is being done in the northwest corner of the garden. This is maybe the most nondescript part of the garden. Even ramshackle. It was of course the first area to be dug, and so has been neglected for about twenty-five years. But something is happening there now. (Even though it might not look like it.)Well, the work isn’t happening right now, because it snowed last night, but I’m not being very chronological in my post today. But that big post on the right is now much shorter; it was sawed day before yesterday.

It was yesterday, or maybe the day before–I think the day before–that the water in the canal stopped. It was kind of strange to see. (It’s flowing again as of this evening.)

We walked along and could see movement in the canal. The guy I live with said there was a crawdad fight and so I went down the bank a little, just to look. 

The guy I live with said these were really big crawdads. If you read the post I mentioned earlier, “Escape Claws”, you’ll know that I came sort of close to being pinched by a crawdad a couple of years ago, and so he said I couldn’t go all the way down into the canal bottom, or bed I guess, and look at the crawdads, because the next thing I knew we would be racing to the vet’s with a crawdad pinching my nose. It would seem all serious and everything but eventually everyone would laugh, except me, and then people would snicker for years afterward when they told the story of the crawdad and my nose. I’d probably have a scar, too.

So we just looked at them.

I know this has been a really rambling post, but today seemed like a good day to be ultra-rambling. I’ll leave you with a picture of me when I was much cleaner than I wound up being today (though I did go into the canal to wash my feet). 

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 to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Stuff And Nonsense”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I guess you can see what happened here. And I think I could use some dark glasses. Kind of bright out. The weather was pretty scary. Lots of thunder (in March….), rain, graupel, soft hail bigger than peas, snow, and then these huge snowflakes, which the guy I live with said were really clusters of snowflakes, as wide as my paws. Which are not really big paws, but they were big snowflakes. He didn’t get any pictures of them because we were out walking and it was really wet and he worried that the camera might get soaked so he didn’t bring it.

Notice how it starts snowing harder right after the thunder. I left my pine cone out on the flagstone but it was too wet to bring in.

Some flowers didn’t get wrecked by the cold and snow. People around here always go crazy when it snows at this time of the year, talking about how wonderful all the “moisture” is (they mean water) and in fact we did get about three-quarters of an inch (1.9 cm) of water, though we didn’t really need it, and fortunately there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of damage to the plants.

This is the regular species Iris reticulata which has been in the garden for a quarter of a century.  It’s strongly scented of violets. Maybe the picture should show it purpler. The guy I live with said he’s always had trouble keeping Colchicum bulbocodium (which used to be called Bulbocodium vernum), but these seem to be doing okay. Though they are not hugely impressive; just kind of cute. These crocuses are called Crocus kosaninii ‘April View’.The guy I live with said he planted these several years ago, and thought they had died because nothing happened and he didn’t see any crocuses, but maybe the corms he planted were too small to flower and they built themselves up and are now able to flower. This happens sometimes.

Really, though, the biggest news here is that there’s water running in the canal again.I was pretty sure I saw a muskrat right by the edge of the canal, but the guy I live with said maybe not. Only one of us is the real expert in muskrat detection. I stuck my whole nose in a pretty big hole right by the edge of the canal even after the guy I live with said not to; he said the muskrat could have grabbed me by the nose and pulled me into its lair.

With all the talk of being held captive in The Lair of the Muskrat I began to think that the guy I live with was just making all of this up. The hole right next to the canal was pretty big, though.

The canal banks are pretty steep right here. The guy I live with said my shadow looked like a Rodent of Unusual Size. I didn’t get that; he said he would explain some time, but anyway we went down to the part of the canal where it curves off away from the road, and there’s this what you might call other road, less well-traveled, and the canal banks are much less steep.Of course I had to try some wading. I only went wading for about half a second. The water was really cold. I couldn’t believe how cold it was but I wanted to seem all tough and nonchalant so I stood there by the bank trying to seem pensive, like a poet lying on a riverbank, thinking up a poem about spring.

I bet not too many poets got their paws frozen thinking up spring poems by riverbanks, but maybe they weren’t as tough and resilient as I am. I’ll leave you with a pretty delightfully riparian picture of me (if you ignore how cold the water was). 

Until next time, then.