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 news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “A Slight Change”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I might be looking a bit dubious here. Possibly because of the excessive number of sibilants in the title of today’s post, or possibly just because. I’m not always sure what the guy I live with is up to, these days.

The weather has been pretty nice. Today it was seventy-five degrees F (about twenty-five degrees Celsius), with nine percent humidity. It’s supposed to snow a bit, tonight. No, really.

There was wind coming off the mountains which has been giving us some spectacular sunsets. You can see the way the wind was making ripples in the clouds.In this one here, which I thought was a bit frightening, those lighter lines are caused by what you might call waves of wind, off the mountains.Then yesterday evening the sunset was just super red. The guy I live with took this picture, zoomed in a bit, on our evening walk, looking south. This is mostly the whole sunset.The water stopped flowing in the canal, either on Thanksgiving or the day before.You can tell that winter is coming just by looking at things beside no water in the canal, even though it’s been so warm. This is Geranium dalmaticum, which the guy I live with said came from Lamb Nurseries in Spokane a very long time ago.The sedum which we don’t know the name of has turned a very dark red.Teucrium montanum has turned color, too. The guy I live with said he’d never noticed that it did this.Pinus mugo ‘Carsten’s Wintergold’ (or just ‘Carstens’) is turning, too.  The guy I live with went through a dwarf conifer phase some years ago, and a few of them survived. And Crocus longiflorus is flowering. This picture isn’t in focus, obviously, and the color is all wrong (it’s a lot more pinkish-purple), but at least the crocus is flowering. It started flowering at this time last year, too.

The guy I live with says he has no idea where this came from. The crocus is native to southwestern Italy and Malta, so that’s originally where it came from, but he doesn’t remember where he got it, which in itself is a bit scary.Speaking of crocuses, there has been a great deal of moping over Crocus biflorus subsp. melantherus, which is also called just plain melantherus. It’s a favorite here, and last year was in flower in October, but there was no sign of it at all this year.

The guy I live with said we hadn’t had enough rain, which is almost always the case here, so he went out a couple of times with the watering can, and watered where the crocuses were supposed to be, and then put a “portable greenhouse” on top of where he watered.

These little greenhouses are kind of conspicuous but they do work.So look what we found today.Speaking of finding things, well, this next section might be extremely boring. You can skip it if you want to.

The guy I live with has been looking in the Snowdrop Frame a few times every day and wondering where the heck everything is. I would point out that since he doesn’t do much of anything, looking every single day might give the impression that it’s taking longer for things to happen than it might if he only checked every three or four days.

At least one snowdrop is almost in flower. This is Galanthus elwesii var. monostictus Hiemalis Group ex Broadleigh. That’s really its name. We purebred border collies are far too refined to let out a guffaw in instances like this, but, well, you know, it’s worth at least a snicker or two.Well, there are a few others of its ilk here, as well. The trouble is that they were transplanted from another area of the garden where, at this time of year, they were in too much shade to flower, and–I’ll put this diplomatically–now that they’ve been moved, there’s some uncertainty at to exactly where they are, because the labels may not be where they’re supposed to be.

There are, as maybe you can see from the label, where it says “group” on it, that these are more of the Hiemalis Group snowdrops (some forms of Galanthus elwesii var. monostictus don’t flower so early), which weren’t from any famous garden, but there’s one from Montrose, the garden in North Carolina, which was “missing”. Until this picture was taken. The guy I live with noticed the one at the bottom of the picture.“So where on earth is Galanthus elwesii var. monostictus Hiemalis Group ex Highdown?”

I couldn’t help at all. However, if you look at this picture, you’ll see green near the two labels at top left and top right, and then at least two more snowdrops at a considerable distance from the labels. So ….The actual label for ….ex Highdown is lying on the ground in the shade garden on the north side of the house, where the snowdrop used to be.

“Well, whatever. It’ll all sort itself out.”

I’m not so sure, but let’s say it will.

Then there was a bunch of moaning about Galanthus elwesii ‘Three Ships’. It got its name from the Christmas carol, you know; it “should” have been up by now, in order to flower about the time you start hearing “I saw three ships” playing in the stores, a few hundred times an hour.

But then yesterday, I heard a triumphant cry from the vicinity of the Snowdrop Frame.

Three Ships

Imagine my sigh of relief.

In the shade garden, where I don’t go (there are fences and gates), the guy I live with said that even though Galanthus reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’ didn’t flower this year, because of lack of rain, it has obviously increased, after being in the garden for a few years. You can tell it’s what it is because of the stripes.There are a lot of other snowdrops up, too. This isn’t really unusual for this time of year. These are probably Galanthus elwesii ‘Teresa Stone’. These came from the garden in Portland where they were first discovered.There are even more (not ‘Teresa’) around the leaves of Cyclamen hederifolium. If you look closely, I mean if you’re not already bored to tears, you can see a lot of snowdrops.Then there was this one, which seems very eager to flower. It has no name. Or, maybe I should say it has no label. (When the fence was put up along the north side of the shade garden there was a lot of snapping-off of labels.)Okay, that really is it for the snowdrop business.

I have some pictures of me to show you now. I make pretty cool shadows at this time of year, because of how low the sun is.

Here I am doing an impression of a wild boar, again.This is a goat.  This is a ferocious and deadly wolf. This is a horrible canine from another dimension. (But on a leash.)And this one, not to leave you with any terrifying impressions, is a kitty.I’m pretty good at this, aren’t I?

I hope you enjoyed, or at least pretended to enjoy, this rambling post. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, enjoying a biscuit, on the ancient rattan couch so many of us purebred border collies have loved, surrounded by my newly-washed toys fresh from the dryer.

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 about our modern lifestyle. You may remember me from such posts as “The Bulb Frame”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Those Pottery Barn sheets are really soft, if you didn’t know. I’ve learned a great deal about their excellent qualities in the last couple of years. Sometimes it’s not easy to drag myself off of them to go do something. I’ve learned that from someone else who lives here.

It rained last night. Not a huge amount, but enough so that the guy I live with could say that it was raining. Then later, some time in the night, it got down to a little below freezing.The birdbath isn’t level, as you can tell. It needs to be leveled, and then the heater needs to be set up.

There was even some snow on the foothills. This is looking to the southwest.There were two hawks in the sky this morning, to the north. I think there’s only one in this picture.Anyway, a couple of other things have happened. One kind of major, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

There are some crocuses still flowering, but the main action, such as it is, is in the Snowdrop Frame. There are snowdrops up. Most of these are early-flowering ones, planted here so that they could get the sun and attention (watering) that they needed. Eventually the guy I live with says he might divide them and stuff. I suppose “eventually” means “probably never”, but it is possible that he might actually do some of the things he says he’s going to.

The frame is covered with translucent plastic. You can see me guarding the frame if you look really closely.Maybe this is a better angle. The frame is totally guarded, as you can see.Those green leaves behind me are Lilium candidum, and they should be green like that, right now. You plant this one fairly early, at the end of summer, like September, and not too deeply, and it grows these tufts of leaves which overwinter.

Well, this is what happened. You see that other little “portable greenhouse” on the left? Hard not to miss it.The guy I live with was sure there was a snowdrop coming up there, an early one called Galanthus peshmenii, because he was given a couple of bulbs and planted them there. Or so he thought.

Not much was happening to the green shoot coming up, so he decided, after debating for a while because usually when he decides to dig something up that’s the end of the plant, but he dug down a little, and saw roots, so he knew the bulb could be dug up. In other words it wasn’t planted very deeply.

So it was dug up. The guy I live with looked at it and thought it was kind of odd for a snowdrop, and that it smelled like onions. Snowdrops don’t really smell like onions. So it probably wasn’t a snowdrop after all. It got moved into the frame anyway, just to see what would happen.

When it was moved there, he noticed some other green shoots coming up near a label that said Galanthus peshmenii. One plant already flowered, so now he has no idea what’s going on.

“Maybe I moved them there a while ago”, he said. Like he moves plants in his sleep. I had no idea at all. It was important to him, anyway.

Now about the other thing. This is pretty major.

I think the toaster is haunted.

This is it, here. It has this cloth over it, because it’s always had a cloth over it. Some things around here stay the way they were for a very long time. But I don’t like the toaster.

It gives me chills just to show you this.

I wasn’t afraid of the toaster for a long time, and then suddenly, some time this year, I decided it was scary. Not just regular scary, but ultra scary. The guy I live with thought that was funny, because he said the first purebred border collie who lived here, Flurry, was afraid of the toaster, too. Like it was haunted or something.

At that time it was like a model from the late nineteen-forties, probably insulated with asbestos, with a cloth-covered electrical cord. The toaster stopped working a couple of times and the guy I live with repaired it. The lady of the house loved the old toaster and making toast with it, but Flurry got so upset when toast was made that the practice was discontinued. Flurry lived to be seventeen so there was a long period of no toast-making in the house.

The old toaster finally broke, and a new one was purchased. The new one didn’t have the “character” of the old one (or the asbestos) but eventually it became part of the household and toast was made regularly again. If it could be toasted, it was.

But now ….well, the guy I live with doesn’t make toast very often, so I’ll just have to be super alert.

Any other news I might have pales in comparison to the scary toaster, but we haven’t seen the muskrat in a few days. We looked. You’re supposed to be able to see them around sunset, which is when this picture was taken. The guy I live with said it was probably working on its fort, for the winter. It’s important to have a fort.And there are things to look at in the garden. Maybe not incredibly interesting things, but things, nonetheless.

Viburnum farreri has buds now. The guy I live with says the buds are “focus-proof”. Just because he can’t take a good picture of the buds, I’d say. And so does Daphne blagayana. This daphne was found by Count Blagay on his estate in Slovenia in the early nineteenth century. It’s been here for a while now. It kind of lies flat on the ground, the way it should. Reginald Farrer, after whom the viburnum was named, said, in The English Rock Garden, that you were supposed to pile stones (preferably limestone) on the branches because that helped it grow. We haven’t done that yet, and so the guy I live with says the daphne will probably pass away, but if it does, it will make an interesting, if short, story.Then there are bunches of cyclamen. These are Cyclamen coum. They all came from the guy I live with’s late friend in New York, and have seeded around like crazy in the last quarter century. “Show the willow pictures!” I was getting to them. The guy I live with has been taking willow pictures, at dusk. So here they are. We think this is Salix amygaloides, the peach-leaf willow. 

We haven’t even walked down to the Big Scary Willow yet. I guess we might do that later.

Okay, I think I’ve pretty much covered everything. I’ll leave you with a picture of me on my morning walk, so you can see the impressive shadow I cast. (The guy I live with said it looked like a wild boar.)

Until next time, then.