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 what’s been happening here. You may remember me from such posts as “Rain”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I couldn’t figure out what the guy I live with was doing. He said he didn’t know either, but then he noticed the emerging leaves of seakale, Crambe maritima, right there in the gravel, and so took of a picture of the new growth, which is pretty cool-looking.
Some people say the leaves are edible. The guy I live with is dubious, because it has the word kale in it.
Anyway this plant certainly doesn’t need to grow in “shingle” like it does on beaches in Europe (hence the name, seakale); this is very heavy clay which isn’t our native soil but was spread on top of that soil by the developer.

We’ve had almost an inch of rain in the last few days. One evening we had thunder and lightning, and I had to hide in my Upstairs Fort so as not to be struck by lightning.
It even rained overnight. That’s very unusual.

Viburnum farreri is in flower. This shrub is in a place where it flowers late–not early–but the heliotrope-scented flowers are always welcome. The guy I live with is an admirer of Reginald Farrer’s writing and has all his books.
The guy I live with and his wife used to make pilgrimages to the botanic gardens in winter because this viburnum can be in flower in Denver any time starting around Christmas or a little earlier (believe it or not), but January or February are more likely times to see it in flower.

There are a bunch of plants in flower now but I’ll just show you this. I think this is Fritillaria caucasica.

The guy I live with was surprised to see how well the “partridge feather”, Tanacetum densum var. amanum, was doing after last summer and the grasshopper infestation.
The “mystery tanacetum” growing near it also looks good.
No one has been able to identify this. He received it as seed labeled Achillea umbellata, and it’s not that. It’s a tanacetum; white daisy flowers.

And then he was surprised to see all the seedlings of Eremurus spectabilis.
The guy I live with gets mildly annoyed when he posts pictures of this eremurus on Facebook and people make comments like their eremurus are doing well, but they’re not referring to this one, and, being a bulb snob (if you hadn’t noticed), he’s strongly tempted to say that he doesn’t think they’re growing this one, but he doesn’t say anything.

Speaking of things like that, he noticed that a snowdrop that he thought had died really hadn’t.
This is Galanthus koenenianus. It’s a pretty rare one. There are a couple of other bulbs of this species in the garden. It has these strange furrows on the outer sides of the leaves.
(If you were wondering what the green leaves are in this picture, they’re Colchicum baytopiorum. See, I told you. Bulb snob.)

Okay, enough of that. I’d rather talk about me. Way more interesting.
Here I am barking.
You can see that the field is turning green. That’s smooth brome, which has infiltrated the garden again under cover of winter. The guy I live with dug out all the roots last summer and here it is back again.
This is an area left unplanted so I can monitor what’s going on in the field. I have to challenge every dog being walked in the field, but in this case it was something quite different: a large hawk eating something in the cottonwood.
I think this was a red-tailed hawk but I’m not totally sure. It was big. As big as the owls I bark at, too.
I learned to do this when the guy I live with would stop and take pictures of owls. I figured he was scared of them so I was obligated to warn them off with my deadly and threatening fierce barking.
The guy I live with tells me the owls and hawks aren’t scared of me, but I kind of doubt it.

It’s supposed to rain and snow here for the next five days. The guy I live with is delighted at the prospect. I’m a bit less sanguine, though if there’s no thunder I’ll be okay with it.

Meanwhile, I’ve had the pleasure of watching the guy I live with paint. This isn’t as interesting as it sounds, but I know it’s making him happy, because he likes to paint. He said that in Zen they have a word for this, samu, “just working”.
He has gotten some help from the woman at the paint store, guiding him with the right color combinations.
Today he painted the four doors in the hallways, upstairs and downstairs.
He said that in an ideal world (which this isn’t, though to me it is) he would replace the carpet with hardwood or bamboo flooring, get a new bathroom floor (we only have one bathroom so I think you can see the problem there), and a new kitchen floor (the guy I live with said that Slipper, a purebred border collie who lived here before me, would pull on the fake linoleum with “his front teeth” and pull it up in shreds, revealing the hideous green fake lineoleum below it), but he also explained that when you get to a certain age some things that seemed important a long time ago aren’t any more, which is kind of liberating.
Instead, he’s just going to keep painting.

Welcome to my world as it is now. I have a hard time keeping up, but at least the guy I live with broke out the pre-tariff cans of Canadian salmon and rice to go on my dinner, so things are looking up for me. The guy I live with says I have “cat food breath”, which is horrible to think of, but I like salmon a lot.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me waiting for the guy I live with to open the front door after one of my evening walks.

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 mostly to talk about our recent weather. You may remember me from such posts as “Stuff And Nonsense”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This picture was taken today.

Well, things were moderately intense over the last couple of days. On Monday, we had a “red flag warning”, which meant a lot of wind and “critical fire danger”.
It was kind of scary, but it didn’t get as windy as they said it might.
When the day was over we both breathed a sigh of relief, but then we had another warning yesterday.
There was more wind, but, again, not as much as they said, and after a while the sky got darker, and then it started to rain. And then something the guy I live with said was “sleet” began to fall. And then it stopped.
And then it started again. The guy I live with said he could see snow blowing horizontally out in the field, but I was upstairs in my fort, because it was thundering. There was also lightning.
This is what it looked like outside, but I didn’t know it.
Eventually all of this stopped. The guy I live with looked at the radar and said the storm, which went on a very narrow path north to south, had moved south, and that it was safe for us to go on my evening walk, which we did.
The guy I live with took this picture of the willow.

The next day, I mean today, things looked like this:
That’s Crocus ancyrensis, with the purplish C. atticus behind it.

There was a colchicum, Colchicum soboliferum, looking very chilly. This is a little spring-flowering colchicum.

On my morning walk, I climbed down to investigate the canal bed. The guy I live with said water could start flowing any time.
The snow is mostly gone now.

As I said before, the guy I live with has been painting. He finished the living room the other day. He’s an obsessive painter. To the point where he touched up some spots with his wife’s art brushes, believe it or not.
He took down the swag around the divider; it’s been there as long as I can remember.
It was really dusty and falling apart, so he’s thinking about not putting it back, and tossing it. It was very difficult to clean.

All the books were dusted and put back in their proper place, so I thought I would show you a few more of his wife’s illustrated books, and maybe I’ll make this a semi-regular feature until there are no more books to show.




The guy I live with still has a difficult time looking at her books, even after all these years.
But here they are.

That’s all I have for today. We could do with a lot less excitement in our lives, that’s for sure. Maybe no excitement at all would be best.

Even though the guy I live with said something about what I’d done to the couch last night, I’ll show how I dealt with all of this.

Until next time, then.