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 with something a little different.
You may remember me from such posts as “A Nice Day”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m making sure no dogs are coming toward me, and so nobly protecting the guy I live with.

The green belt is flowering. It’s a golden yellow belt now.
I got covered with grass flowers on my walk this evening.

This morning or yesterday morning we went to look at the prickly poppies in flower.
Argemone platyacanthos.
The rest of the pictures were posted on Facebook, but here they are again.
This is Stipa ucrainica; the picture was taken at twilight.
Asphodeline lutea coming up through a dwarf oak the guy I live with got from the late Jerry Morris:
The flowering stalk on Yucca reverchonii:
The guy I live with said “someone photobombed this picture”.

And the first calochortus. This is Calochortus venustus.
It’s in a cage to protect it from being eaten by rabbits, which kills the bulbs because they can’t photosynthesize.
There are some other calochortus which may flower here soon.
Most of the guy I live with’s attempts to grow calochortuses have been complete failures. Every so often one will appear, the guy I live with will get all excited, and then we don’t see them for years.
But maybe it’s because we’ve had so much rain that we’re seeing them again.

One other thing. The guy I live with says yes this is native to California, but that doesn’t mean anything about its hardiness if the leaves don’t emerge so soon that they get frozen (same effect as being eaten by rabbits) or there are no overwintering leaves and the species hasn’t evolved to manufacture cryoprotective sugars (“antifreeze”).
Like snowdrops have overwintering leaves but they manufacture antifreeze, so they’re fine.
Calochortus come up, flower, and then die down. No issues.

If it gets really cold, and it certainly does here, the bulbs are insulated because they’re in the ground, and if the soil freezes here, it doesn’t freeze very deeply.

Now that it’s getting warmer and raining less, the talk is turning to penstemons, and the guy I live with posted this didactic picture of a semi-dissected flower. He used the phone camera for this, which maybe you’ll agree is pretty impressive.
This shows how to identify a penstemon.
First, you need to know where you are. Like you would never see this species in Colorado.
Second, you need to look at the basal and stem leaves.
Third, the inflorescence, whether it’s in a whorl, or secund (flowers on just one side of the flowering stalk), and so on.
And fourth, you need to look at the anthers and the sterile staminode.
We’ll just look at the flower here.
You can see the little hairs on the corolla. The anthers, the little brown things, are peltate-explanate (from the Latin pelta, a little shield; you can see how it looks sort of like a Roman centurion holding a small flat–explanate–shield).
This puts this in Section Peltanthera. Other species in this section are Penstemon palmeri, which I showed last time; P. clutei and P. parryi from Arizona; P. grinnelli, P. clevelandii, P.centranthifolius, and P. spectabilis from California.
And quite a few less well-known species.

The rose-red corolla and its shape makes this Penstemon pseudospectabilis, from Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.
But here’s an odd thing. Take a look at the staminode, the thing sort of hanging down. No beard. The subspecies with a bearded staminode is subsp. connatifolius, the most common subspecies (probably now considered just variety); the term connate means leaves clasping the stem.
So this is subspecies (or variety) pseudospectabilis, which is the rarer of the two, and yet this is the one common in the nursery trade.

Whew, huh. I’ve learned a lot about penstemons, don’t you think?
For years the guy I live with had issues with people asking for identification of penstemons, like ones they’ve seen on hikes, and so on. It brought up too many memories of him and his wife working on books, but now I guess he’s okay with it.

Well, that’s all I have for today. I hope the penstemon business wasn’t too much

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 bring you up to date on what’s been happening here. You may remember me from such posts as “A Scary Visitor”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m being brave after the events of yesterday, which I’ll get to in a minute.
You can see what’s been happening here.
And also this:
The guy I live with decided that the old, wobbly, cracked wooden stepladder might not be what you would call exactly safe, so he bought a new one which he really likes a lot.
For painting, of course.

In other words, there hasn’t been much gardening going on here, except for some picture-taking and weed-whacking.
The guy I live with has a nice battery-operated trimmer, but the smooth brome that invaded the garden again this year grew very tall and he knew the big Echo trimmer was what was needed. (You’ll see me walking through the smooth brome in the field, later.)
He thought about getting a gallon of gas and some two-cycle engine oil, but when he went to the hardware store for some other stuff, he found, to his delight, that he could buy premixed fuel in a small quantity, and he spent quite some time making a lot of noise out in the back yard, while I stayed in the house for safety’s sake.

Yesterday we were both out in the garden and the guy I live with noticed something before I did. That doesn’t usually happen.
I walked over to the guy I live with and stepped on a snake.
Not just any snake, but a bullsnake about four feet long. (That’s about 1.2 meters.)
The snake became enraged and started hissing furiously and pretending it was a rattlesnake by buzzing its tail. They do that.
It coiled up under the big sagebrush and just hissed and hissed at me.
The guy I live with said it was harmless otherwise and wouldn’t try to bite me, but it was really, really angry. I guess I would be too, if someone stepped on me.

A little later the guy I live with saw it slither across the patio and hide behind the shelves on the patio, and when I came out to look it hissed at me again.
He said he was pretty sure this is the same bullsnake I’ve seen every year since I was a puppy, because no one else in the neighborhood has reported seeing a huge snake, and I have every single year.
The guy I live with calls it our “guest” and thinks all the voles that were in our garden are gone now.

Still, it was pretty scary, believe me.

In between all of this, the guy I live with did manage to take some pictures.
Here are some cactus flowers. (He also posted these on Facebook.)

And here are some pictures of Ixiolirion tataricum, which has seeded all over the front part of the back garden.

And here are some pictures of Penstemon palmeri:

That’s all I have for today. It was kind of a lot, really.
And to think the guy I live with wonders why we have so few visitors. Just kidding of course.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me walking through the sea of brome, as promised. You can see how tall it’s grown since my last post.

Until next time, then.