the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the fairly regular-sized, but I like to think cuddlably small, purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you some very mysterious news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Upended Breakfast”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. The guy I live with put some of my toys on top of his head. He’s really weird. Though, even weirder is what happened today. Or, I should say, what was discovered today.

You see this? Here it is from another angle. This is the “eminence” upon which I often lie, or sometimes sit, and on which I get my picture taken, kind of a lot. There was a bit of watering done there, but you can see that there’s nothing in that dark area there. The blue-green plants at the bottom are California poppy seedlings, and then there’s a sort of dried-up clump of grass to the right of that. Then above that is the dark area (where the guy I live with was just digging), then at the top of the dark area are two more clumps of grasses. (The guy I live with says this doesn’t look much different from a weedy parking lot.)

Well….this morning the guy I live with walked out to the “eminence”, or little mound, and wondered where all the grasses went. Last October he planted several gallon-sized pots of sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula), and he noted a few weeks ago that there was new growth on them, and now they’re gone.

In that dark area, there should have been five or six healthy plants of sideoats grama, but there is absolutely no sign of the grasses at all.

I thought about this for quite a while. It was super-puzzling. I know I didn’t dig them up, because the rootballs would have been strewn around (I used to do things like that when I was littler), and no rabbits have snuck into the back yard, so what happened to the grasses?

Both of us began to worry. The “eminence” is made of sandy loam and pea gravel, as maybe you could tell, and when plants are planted there, they root into the loam very quickly, so the grasses would have been difficult to pull out. Who would do this? The guy I live with’s friend came over today and she looked at the place where the missing grasses were, too. She said they were missing. So all three of us agreed on that.

This was so worrisome, I had to hide behind a couple of blades of grass (smooth brome, in this case.) You might have trouble seeing me here. I would say that it isn’t an exaggeration to say that, just today, the guy I live with did about a whole month’s worth of thinking. The guy I live with thought and thought, and then wondered, some.

When it cooled off tonight, the guy I live with and I played a game in the living room. That helped me feel a lot less uneasy about the missing grass business. There doesn’t seem to be any plausible explanation. I guess this will be just another unsolved mystery. Though the guy I live with says that if any of you are reading this and have seen five or six missing plants of sideoats grama, to let us know. 

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the, oh, I guess completely normal-sized purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you more news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “We-Are-From-France”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I guess I was listening to something behind me. I can do that, you know. This is me doing it again.There’s stuff flowering in the garden right now. Not a whole lot of things, because the guy I live with thinks he’s being super-clever by not having a garden focused on plants that flower from now until, say, the end of August. There are some summer flowers, of course. The guy I live with is not a complete weirdo. But summer isn’t as colorful here as it is in a lot of gardens.

Here’s Allium cristophii; one that almost everybody has, and one that reseeds like crazy. So there are hundreds in the garden here now. And Allium nigrum. We don’t know why it’s called “nigrum”, since it pretty obviously white, but maybe the anthers are black, or something. I think this is Gladiolus italicus. It just started. The guy I live with figured out which one this was last summer, because he thought it might be G. imbricatus. The seed he got said “italicus”. And Asphodeline lutea is starting to flower. This is Oregon Sunshine, Eriophyllum lanatum, a favorite here. The big surprise of the year is the paintbrush that I guess just got its seed sprinkled on a couple of the troughs last autumn. This is the Wyoming State Flower, Castilleja linariifolia. Rosa kokanica has just started, too. I hear there used to be a lot of roses in the garden here, but now there aren’t. You can’t really see the doubly-serrate leaf margins which are diagnostic for this species, but I think if you do a search for this rose on the blog, there are pictures of the leaf margins. The bees really like this rose, and it’s scented, too. I guess we should talk about the sad thing now. But first, since this is happening in the front yard, take a look at Sphaeralcea munroana. (Maybe that species.)Well, okay, the sad farewell part. It looks like the big desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, which has been here for thirty years, has finally given up. “Maybe not”, said the guy I live with, “but probably”. There are three other desert willows here that have leafed out completely. The big trunks there, that’s the desert willow. The guy I live with said it was like saying goodbye to an old friend. I guess there’s been a lot of that around here in the last several years, and this is only a plant, but it’s been through everything “Denver’s horrible weather” can throw at it. I guess the seventy-three degree (F) drop in temperature over a forty-eight hour period in November 2014 was just too much for it. That cold snap did kill a lot of trees around here, too, I think.

The funny thing is that this desert willow is, or maybe was, from the farthest north known population, and supposedly the hardiest, but the desert willows here, from farther south, are just fine. Go figure, huh. Last year, the big desert willow didn’t leaf out until something like August. Those lines you see in the picture are some of last year’s growth, but they’re all dead.

I guess it’s pretty sad. The guy I live with says since we live here, we have to get used to such things happening, and not just occasionally. Like, all the time.

There might be other sad things going on in the front yard, too, because the Utah juniper was so disfigured by all the heavy snow we had that the guy I live with says he can’t stand looking at it, and might take it out. You can see how badly splayed it is in the picture of the desert willow. It’s in the upper right.

It was pretty hot today, for a purebred border collie anyway, and so I suffered a whole lot, until the thunderstorms began to roll in. The guy I live with does not like thunderstorms, and I might agree with him.The storm you see here turned out to be the tail-end of a storm that dropped “ping-pong-ball-sized” hail, but fortunately it went to the southwest of us. The guy I live with said that hail that size is bad, and he held up a small lime to show how big that meant. Kind of scary, if you ask me. And why he doesn’t like thunderstorms.

There was thundering so I sat in the living room, in the dark. Quite sensibly, if you ask me. It cooled off later, and that was pretty good. I guess that’s it for today, anyway.

Until next time, then.