the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the still roasting-hot purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you more news about our roastingly hot garden. You may remember me from such heat-related posts as “Super Roasting”, among so many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. This is what you do when it’s hot for days on end.Sometimes the heat does get to you, and you look like this.Maybe you can see how dry the garden is, in that picture. It’s dry. The guy I live with says it might never rain again. It looks like it’s going to rain, almost every day. Very gloomy, but still hot. This picture might look like rain, but the guy I live with says that nature is faking it. Sometimes I get bored and play with grasshoppers. I admit that the guy I live with can be quite a hoot, at times, but grasshoppers are pretty interesting. He said to make sure not to eat the grasshopper, because then I might get all jumpy.

Let’s look at some things in the garden, now. This the native “cowpen daisy”, Verbesina encelioides. It’s an annual. An unhappy annual. Here’s the lilac, ‘Victor Lemoine’, with drooping leaves. You can see how gloomy it is here. You can’t really see how hot it is, or how dry, but it is gloomy. The “lawn” is really pathetic. The guy I live with said he was going to fix that. Eventually. The “way back” is super dry, too. The buffalo grass looks okay, but it gets watered about once a week. Not everything is totally gloomy, of course. The Tecoma ‘Orange Jubilee’ is flowering. It’s in a big pot on the patio and gets water. It takes a little bit of frost, so if it gets left out on the patio by mistake, it doesn’t die. The leaves get all wrecked, but they grow back. There’s also the yellow-flowered Tecoma stans, in a pot, that’s been here for decades. The lady of the house grew it from seed, and it’s been left out in freezing weather more than once. And allowed to dry out and drop all its leaves, too. And even though there aren’t very many flowers here, the hummingbirds are still happy. Because it’s so thundery in the evenings, I only go on my morning walks. The other day I was just walking along, the way you do, and the guy I live with said I almost stepped on a huge bullsnake. He said I wasn’t very observant. But I was on my walk, after all, and when you’re on a walk, walking is what you do. Walking and sniffing. Not looking around for enormous snakes that might swallow you. That’s the guy I live with’s job, to make sure that doesn’t happen.

And so, then, there was another horticultural crisis. It may have been partly my fault. The neighbor got a new dog, and I wanted to meet it, and bark at it a lot, and things like that. The guy I live with had to put up another fence (he says I’ll learn not to race and leap through the garden, when I get older, but I doubt it), and then when I stood on the two troughs in the corner, to try to see over the fence, he decided to move them. He said that Slipper, who lived here a while ago, stood on troughs too, and broke one, once, but that it was the guy I live with’s fault, because of the way the trough was placed.

The guy I live with said the troughs weigh at least two hundred pounds each (about ninety-one kilograms), but he has a method of moving them, which he showed in an earlier post. (Though, this time, he didn’t break a trough at the end.)

So the troughs are moved, and now there is this space. The soil is “beyond awful”. It’s possible that either a great deal of thought will be put into deciding which plant, or plants, will go here (keeping in mind that I need to be able to look through the fence), or that no thought at all will go into the decision, and the guy I live with will just get something, plant it, and the plant will die. That happens a lot.

That piece of vintage steel garden fence on the right protects a plant of Clematis × triternata ‘Rubromarginata’ (whew) which isn’t quite dead yet.

A shipment of bulbs came today. Maybe if you looked at the other pictures you can guess why the guy I live with likes bulbs so much. (They’re underground all summer.)It may surprise you to learn that sometimes these posts take quite a bit of time to prepare. When I started this post, things were all gloomy and roasting. And then this happened.This isn’t enough rain to make the plants happy, but it’s enough to cool things off so I’m not so roastingly hot. And that’s what really counts.

The guy I live with says it’s supposed to cool off even more by this weekend, and maybe even rain some more. That sounds okay to me. 

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 up to date on our roastingly hot, super sizzlingly dry garden. You may remember me from such other heat-related posts as “Beyond Super Roasting”, among at least a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.This was taken in the morning, before it got so unbelievably roastingly hot. It was just really, really hot, and the guy I live with has some sort of allergy that’s making his eyes “all burning, puffy, and blurry”, and so he was in a bad mood today, besides being hot.

I have some pictures of the garden for you. It was so hot today that the camera almost melted. You can see a hose there, I think, but the garden doesn’t get very much hose water. It certainly hasn’t gotten much of any rain water, for months now. Except for that one time, when there was a little, but then the very next day the garden dried up again. This is me on what the guy I live with says is a lawn. If you memorize this picture, I’ll show you later what it looked like a long time ago, back when the guy I live with spent a fortune on water.

The agaves look pretty good. Maybe now you don’t wonder why this part of the garden is fenced off.The trough patio finally got cleaned up on a day when it wasn’t a zillion degrees out. The seed pots were emptied, after sitting there for a couple of years, and some of the troughs were moved. They weigh a couple hundred pounds each. The dirt still needs to be swept up.

Maybe you can see that the flagstones in the middle are laid out like the rays of the sun. The lady of the house designed this, but the guy I live with set these after she was gone. He didn’t know exactly how they were supposed to go. But you can see the “sun”, the two curving tiles by the brown pot there, and then the “rays”. Sort of. The lawn in the “way back” gets some water, but it’s still a bit crisp.So, well, it is kind of tiresome to talk about how miserably dry and pathetic the garden is, and so we decided to show you some pictures of how it looked before. (Before the lady of the house died, is what we mean.)

I’m posting these to make me feel cooler. They are also a bit sad. But I’m being selfish since it was so horribly hot today.

This is Flurry, when he was really ancient, lying on the green lawn. There really was a green lawn here. They called it “The Great Lawn”, after English gardening books. This was about fourteen years ago. It doesn’t look very roasting hot to me. And that tiny puppy on the left is Chess. 

This was the “Long Border”. The guy I live with took this out the year after the lady of the house died. He always wanted a dry garden there instead, but she liked this so much, he kept it, even though it needed huge amounts of water. No one ever paid any attention to it when they came over to see the garden, and when he took it out, everyone said how much they liked it. 

How it looked in autumn. Flurry again. The pool was filled up. It was a lot of work to maintain. I heard this story, though, that when Chess, the border collie who lived here before me, showed up, on his very first day, he fell into the pool. And liked that a lot.

Kind of a pleasant autumnal picture, don’t you think? The guy I live with doesn’t feel like saying whether he likes the garden and “lawn” that replaced this better, or not, but the way it is now requires a lot less watering, and that’s good.

Okay, one more cooling-off picture. A spring snow, on The Great Lawn. This is Slipper, on the left, about to attack Flurry, who was really too old to be attacked. But it happened anyway.I thought a nice cool interlude would be good. I know I enjoyed it, even though I wasn’t in any of the pictures.

Back to today, now. I had planned to talk about how endlessly hot the weather is, and that’s pretty much how things go these days, though this evening it got really dark, and thundered, and started to rain.The rain didn’t last very long, but it cooled things off quite a bit. You might also see that the small tree that used to be in the middle of pictures like this isn’t there any more. There’s a reason for that. It was removed. I’ll talk about that some other time.

It thundered quite a bit, and I know enough not to be outside when that happens. I’ll leave you with a picture of me not being outside when it’s thundering.

Until next time, then.