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 some sunset pictures and other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Horticultural Invective”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. Kind of daydreaming, I guess. The guy I live with was not enormously happy that I chose to leap onto the bed with muddy paws, but I wondered how else would I get onto the bed.

It wasn’t my fault that parts of the garden were muddy. You know how we have dirt paths here, well, if it snows and then the snow melts, guess what happens? True, most of the snow does evaporate, but some snow melts in the paths and then there’s mud.

If you were wondering why there was all this talk of melting snow at almost the end of the year, this is why.Really.

When we woke up this morning it was super windy. But also cloudy, which was weird. Our bedroom faces east, like they say to have it in A Pattern Language, and so that was the whole problem.

looking southeast

looking southwest

The wind was blowing from the west, like it almost always does.

It sometimes blows from the north, bringing very cold air, and a lot of complaining from you-know-who about the failure of the government to build a huge mountain range running east-to-west (or the other way around) somewhere to the north, to keep cold arctic air from blowing into our garden.

It sometimes blows from the east, which is called “upslope”. That’s usually in summer, and sometimes brings us rain.

And then, every so often, the wind comes from the south, in late spring, bringing us very bad weather which I’d just as soon not talk about.

Anyway, it was windy. Most of the snow disappeared during the day.The snowdrop ‘Daphne’s Scissors’ was flowering in the Snowdrop Frame. It’s probably just as cold in the frame as it is outdoors, but the snowdrops don’t get snowed on. In the garden there are quite a few snowdrops either flowering (sort of flowering) or showing color. This bud of Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus appeared yesterday or today. You can maybe see that the outer margins of the leaves are slightly folded inward, which gives the species its epithet, plicatus (“folded”). This becomes more evident as the leaves mature.The guy I live with says that this flowering now is perfectly normal and for me not to worry. I probably wouldn’t anyway. He said a lot of people around here are worrying because it isn’t snowing much, and he said that was just plain weird. According to him, this is possibly the only place on the planet where people complain when the weather is nice, wishing it were freezing cold with icy roads. He said the weather today was just fine, if a bit windy.

I didn’t really have very much for today. I do have a bunch of sunset pictures, “made possible by the wind”, which I hope you enjoy. (I’m also supposed to say these are “straight off the camera”; the pictures were cropped a bit, and some were taken using the zoom feature, but that’s all.)