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 today to bring you up to date on all the excitement here. You may remember me from such posts as “Going With The Flow”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.Checking out things on the ground, as usual. It’s very rewarding to look closely at things, if you didn’t know.
This is what I do; I look at things. The guy I live with said humans spend a lot of time thinking about abstract things, but I just look, and occasionally sniff. You can learn a lot by looking, and sniffing.
Here, I’m looking at the fallen flowers of the cottonwoods just out of the picture, on the left.
They kind of look like reddish caterpillars, if you ask me. I’ve seen real caterpillars. They’re creepy.
So I walked through the fallen flowers.
A bit farther to the east, the canal, which you can see on the right, makes a turn, and so we walked that way, and the wild plums (Prunus americana) were in full flower.
The guy I live with says the scent tells him it’s spring, and he also said you (I don’t know who he meant by “you”) can make a nice jam or jelly from them.
Some years these shrubs are covered with plums, but the coyotes usually eat all of them. Maybe birds eat them too.

Our weather has been…unusual. One day we have “fire weather” warnings, and the next, we get rain and snow.
We had almost a quarter inch of rain a couple of days ago (actually at night, which is very unusual), and this coming Thursday there’s another “fire weather” warning, but the guy I live with said maybe that wasn’t for us, exactly.

Things are happening in the garden. One of the manzanitas (this is a low-growing one in the front yard) is flowering.
This picture isn’t in focus, but the guy I live with said to pretend that it is.
The native bluebells, Mertensia lanceolata, are flowering, too:
The juno irises are flowering.
The guy I live with thinks this is Iris vicaria:
This is Iris warleyensis:
And this is Iris aucheri ‘Indigo’:
The guy I live with said this could also be one called ‘Olof’, but he buried the labels so deeply he would have to dig up the whole plant to find the exact name.

Some time around the beginning of last winter he sowed a bunch of seeds of Fritillaria pallidiflora which he had collected from plants in the garden. He just sprinkled the seeds on the ground, and a couple of weeks ago he noticed this:
He said something like “Everything should be this easy to grow from seeds.”
They grow this for medicinal purposes in China and the guy I live with said he’s seen pictures of whole fields of this fritillaria being grown for that purpose.
I’ll show pictures of the other plants in flower in another post.

And of course, throughout all of this, the guy I live with has been painting. He finished the upstairs bedroom, which isn’t used as a bedroom but just has a bunch of the guy I live with’s stuff in it.
There are some things about this room that are beyond my understanding.
That door leads to a small closet which was converted to a computer room where the guy I live with wrote books. He rarely goes in there now.
You can see a map, which is a map of New England, just to the right and above the little can of pipe cleaners (the guy I live with used to smoke a pipe), which his grandfather hand-colored and which the guy I live with has known all his life. Or at least since he was about five years old, so for over sixty-eight years. That’s a long time.
It isn’t worth anything, except for him knowing this for so long. There are some other things like that in this room.
He’s had the little bust of Beethoven (in the bookcase) since he was about fourteen.
I get the impression that painting this room was a huge amount of work.
I hear that our bedroom will be next.

He wasn’t going to paint our bedroom, but he’s been watching “The Residence” on Netflix, which he really likes, to the point of watching it over and over again, and he was struck by the painted walls, so now I’m in for more of this.
It’s very boring to watch someone paint, but our forecast calls for rain, rain, fire weather, rain, snow, rain, snow, and so on, and I know that he gets a lot of pleasure from painting, very stress-relieving (except for the time he spilled paint on the carpet upstairs).
Look what he has to deal with. His wife put this strip at the top of the walls, and you can see that the last time the guy I live with didn’t get any paint on the strip. He thinks his aging, arthritic hands are still steady enough not to get paint on the strip (and he’s using something called “Frog Tape” to mask the strip, but still…).
All very boring, I know.
Fortunately our bedroom is a very small room so there won’t be a lot of moving of things and groaning in pain and stuff like that. At least I hope not.

So that’s all I have for today. I hope I didn’t bore the daylights out of you.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me not looking at the ducks in the canal, but they’re right there. The guy I live with said these are male and female mallards, and the way things go, we can expect ducklings in a couple of months. The ducklings are pretty cute.

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 today to talk about garden help. You may remember me from such posts as “Help Wanted”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Look at those grassy things on this side of the pots. I’ll tell you what they are in a minute.

Today I’d like to talk about garden help, and why the guy I live with is going to eschew help, even though he’s old and creaky.
This was prompted by the picture of the seedlings of Eremurus spectabilis.

Maybe I’ve shown a picture of the little garden the guy I live with planted across the street.
A week or so ago people came in and cut everything practically to the ground. This is the second time this has happened. The first time, all the native grasses the guy I live with bought and planted there were killed outright.
And a bunch of plants he had just planted there were pulled up and thrown away.
He doesn’t really care about this, but it illustrates the point.

Sometimes the guy I live with says he wished he had some help in the garden. His wife was a huge help and loved to weed, but she’s been gone for a very long time now.
People sometimes say he should hire a teenager.
There’s not a chance of that, and I’ll show you why.

Those grassy things. They may look like weeds, but they’re not.
These are Allium jesdianum ‘Per Wendelbo’, first collected by the Norwegian botanist Wendelbo in Afghanistan in the 1960s. Like anyone would go there now to collect more seeds.

Also in the picture are seedlings of Ixiolirion tataricum. Here are more.
And then there are these:
The plants with the broad leaves are Allium cristophii, which the guy I live with doesn’t want in the garden any more, because it seeds around excessively, but what would almost certainly also get pulled up by a helper are the seedlings of Eremurus fuscus (the more narrow upright leaves).
If those got pulled up, he would be steamed, to say the least.
This is a banner year for eremurus seedlings.

These aren’t seedlings, but would be sure to be pulled up.
These are Calochortus venustus. (And a dandelion.)

And finally, these are seedlings of Fritillaria pallidiflora.
I should say that the guy I live with has accidentally pulled up more than a few plants he didn’t want pulled up (not to mention sliced through bulbs with his trowel), but if he’s so familiar with the plants in the garden, imagine the destruction visited on it by someone who didn’t recognize plants out of flower, or what fritillaria seedlings look like.

So that’s why he does everything by himself, and why the garden can look less than tidy. His help is long gone. Sixteen years next month.

I’ll end this post with a weather note.
As we were about to turn around and head home on my evening walk, I saw lightning and then heard thunder, so I walked as fast as I could to get home. The guy I live with said I was walking way too fast, but we made it home just in time for house-shaking thunder, some rain, and hail.
Just little stuff.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me safe in my Upstairs Fort, and very much relieved that the guy I live with came to his senses about hiring some help.

Until next time, then.