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 what we’ve been doing. You may remember me from such posts as “Back From Vacation”, to mention my only other vacation-related post.

Here I am in a characteristically exhausted pose. I’m just back from vacation. It was a lot of fun, but I’m really tired, as you can see. 

It was super hot the last few days, and I do mean super hot, but I was at Day Care for four whole days, playing, and, as you may know, they have swimming there, so I didn’t roast or anything.

The guy I live with and his friend went to a place called Portland. They flew. Originally, they were going to drive, so that they could stop at nurseries and stock up on all kinds of cool plants, but that would mean an extra four days, and the guy I live with realized he would go completely crazy thinking of having to drive back home for two straight days, just to be reunited with me. So they flew.

The guy I live with doesn’t have wings, and is not much of a flier. He said the last time he flew was seventeen years ago. A very long time ago.

He also said–predictably, I must say–that he was going to give up gardening and find some other hobby. “Collecting beer bottle caps” was the first thing he said.

Because, I guess, they don’t have brutally cold winters in Portland, and when it rains it doesn’t strike terror into the heart of a gardener like it does one who lives here and who has experienced really bad hail, and that the summertime is sunny, with no thunder. I knew this was the beginning of yet another phase which I would just have to endure.

They went to a place called the Hoyt Arboretum. They were really looking for the Japanese Garden, but it’s in this suburb with huge trees and winding roads, and the guy I live with actually got lost, which he almost never does. On the way to getting lost, though, he drove past the arboretum, which he’d heard of, and so they turned around and stopped there. The guy I live with said that there’s a considerable difference between the way trees grow here and the way they grow in Portland. The trees were really tall and covered with lichen and moss.

Here’s a picture of his friend (she’s really nice and I like her a lot) taking a picture of something we don’t have here at all.

This is called a slug. The guy I live with said they move very slowly, but he watched it cross the gravel. He said it was like waiting for a traffic light to change, here. (In Portland the traffic lights change in a normal way, and that you don’t see your life pass before your eyes as you wait for the light to change.) He also said that I might like to catch something like this and try it, the way I like to do, but that he would object to that.

Anyway, there were trees and things, and lots of what people here call “greenery”. 

There were lots of shrubs he said he would like to grow, but that they aren’t hardy here. He told me he knew this for certain, but didn’t feel like explaining how he knew this.

 

There were a lot of ceanothus in flower, too. We have a couple in the garden here, but they’re not blue-flowered and heavily scented like these were. (This one is Ceanothus thyrsiflorus ‘Skylark’.)

And then there was this frighteningly weird thing, Pseudopanax ferox. The focus isn’t on it, actually, but on the green leaves behind it, but I think you get the idea. Then the next day they visited a couple of nurseries. But before they went to the nurseries, they visited the Chinese Garden, which is “a lot easier to find than the Japanese Garden because it’s in the middle of downtown”. I guess that makes sense. 

Those are the pictures from Portland, for today.

The guy I live with got home very late last night, and so he couldn’t come and get me until this morning. You may have noticed that in the pictures from Portland there was a lot of sun. This is what our place looked like today. Pretty gloomy, according to you know who. I of course like it, but I do worry about thunder. 

The guy I live with said that maybe later this year, when it starts to get colder, he’ll tell me what it was like flying through a thunderstorm, which he did last night. His friend was a lot calmer about it than he was. I would probably be on his side, with that one.

It hasn’t thundered at all today–yet–and so I guess I’ll let you go, for today, with a picture of me walking out into the garden after a long nap.

 

Until next time, then.

 

 

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the roastingly hot purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest broiling news from our garden. You may remember me from such heat-related posts as
“Not Only Roasting, But Gloomy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I kind of got in trouble last night. A big sphinx moth flew into the house (an Achemon sphinx, the ones that come from copper-colored caterpillars), and the guy I live with spent quite some time trying to catch it with the net. He finally caught it, let it go, out on the patio, and it flew right back into the kitchen. So the guy I live with chased the moth with the net again, caught it, let it back outside, and I grabbed it and ate it.

He was really angry with me. I thought his head was going to explode. Especially since there was another incident earlier in the evening, when his friend was here for dinner, and, well, I’m not allowed to talk about it.

I am a dog, after all.

Speaking of being a dog, we purebred border collies do not like hot weather. Right now it’s ninety degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-two Celsius), with thirteen percent humidity. The guy I live with says the weather will be hot for a while. So here I am, roasting.

I have the pool, but I don’t go in it. The guy I live with says I should, but I don’t. Unless it gets filled with water, and then I go in, when the hose is running. This picture sort of makes it look like I have the pool in my mouth, but of course I don’t. When I go on my walks I can see the ducks in the neighbors’ yard. There have been ducks there for years. I don’t know why ducks don’t land in the pool here. The neighbors have a pool and the ducks like that. Things are changing on my walks. They mowed along the canal road. The grass is already dry and prickly. In the field, though, the grass is getting higher. There are two tracks here because a truck drove through here the other day. It was driven by someone who was authorized to drive through here, so we didn’t worry. But it was hard to tell which track was the one made by Norm and Celeste, the coyotes. It turned out to be the one I’m on in the picture.Back at home, things are getting even more jungly, but it’s also so dry that some plants are beginning to suffer a little. I’ll only show the non-suffering plants. I’m also supposed to show pictures of the garden.

This is the path on the north side. You can see all the way to the “way back”. 

The mockorange (Philadelphus lewisii) is scenting the garden. This garden, on the south side of the house, is blazingly hot. The rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ has burst into flower. Now for a bunch of cactus flowers. 

These are flowers of hybrid echinocereus which the guy I live with got at Timberline Gardens the year before it closed. These next ones really are this color. I can’t see red, but the guy I live with assures me it’s this color.A pink-flowered sphaeralcea appeared in the garden, too. Maybe pink-purple. And the gaillardias are beginning to flower. The guy I live with said he always had a hard time keeping them in the garden (I wasn’t sure if he meant they ran away, or what), but now they’re growing very well here. Seed was sown directly into the heavy clay in the middle of the lawn. I’ve already explained how the native soil isn’t clay, and this stuff gets rock-hard in the summer. Rain never gets it very wet. 

I guess that’s it for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me lying on the patio rug in an “Egyptian” pose. You can see that I’ve been enjoying a pine cone or two. I especially like to do this after the sun goes down, and it’s cool on the patio, while the house is still hot. 

Until next time, then.