the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the tiny, but much bigger than the last time I posted, purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news about me and my garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Passing The Time”, among quite a few others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I know I’m not supposed to be chewing dish rags, but they’re really old and the guy I live with could do with some new ones. I certainly look cute doing things I’m not supposed to do, don’t I?Here I am pretending to be nonchalant. I’m usually hyper-chalant, of course. It’s been mostly raining and stuff, but then for two days it was hot, and I didn’t like that, because purebred border collies, which I’m, don’t like hot weather. I took naps, chased flies, and looked out the window.Then yesterday I went to Day Care, and I did okay, though not as well as the time before, and when the guy I live with came to get me, it started to thunder really loudly, and then hail. The guy I live with was worried that our car might be dented, but he said it was “only marble-sized” hail and that wasn’t so bad, so we waited in the vet’s office until it stopped, and then we drove home through pouring rain.

The guy I live with said we got about three quarters of an inch of rain (that’s 1.9 cm; I’m learning that, too), and that the garden was becoming “hopelessly jungly”.

Most people would think that meant a lot of weeding, but it turned out that it meant more naps, which I liked. I’m kind of enjoying the way my life is unfolding now.

You can see how jungly things are. Here’s the “way back”, which the guy I live with says is ultra-jungly. The area under the arbor is almost always bare of plants, but not this year. That yellow thing is a honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens ‘Sulphurea’, I think, which the guy I live with planted for the lady of the house, because she liked honeysuckles. He said it came from We-Du Nursery about a quarter century ago. The supposedly all-white form of Linum perenne, or whatever, has become all-white, but with some blue. The guy I live with doesn’t know why, unless the white doesn’t come true from from seed.Look how jungly the original rock garden has become, though it’s been a good year for Asphodeline damascena (white) and Echium russicum (red). And talk about completely jungly, the path called “Pooka’s Shortcut” (because he blazed the trail, so to speak) is all but impassable. Except for by me, of course. Rosa kokanica is leaning way over. There is one really different thing about my life, and at first I didn’t like it at all, but we’ve done this a couple of times, and I think I’m going to like it. It’s called “going on a walk”. I think you can see from the picture that I have a tricolor face, but I’m basically what they call a “saddleback”, because the black doesn’t go all the way around my tummy, so I’m two kinds of purebred border collie, which is pretty advanced, if you ask me.

Well, I guess that’s it. The guy I live with says we might do something eventually, but the pattern of my life so far seems pretty good.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the tiny, but less-tiny-than-yesterday, purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news about me and my (sorry, our) garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Bunnies And Flies”, among so many others.

Here I am in a characteristically relaxed pose.We’ve been doing hardly anything in the last few days, because it’s been raining. Not raining like it was before, but raining and thundering. The guy I live with said that’s all it did all last summer, but I don’t know what summer is, so that doesn’t mean much to me. He complains a lot anyway.

There have been a lot of flies to chase, and that’s really fun. If you haven’t tried it, maybe you should. The guy I live with doesn’t like it when I chase really big flies, which he says are “bumblebees”, but they’re fun to chase too. Here I am doing exactly that.I know that, technically, I’m not supposed to be in the rock garden, but I was the star student at Puppy Day Care yesterday, so I must be doing something right, and the guy I live with must just be full of something. See? We quite occasionally have disagreements about stuff, but the guy I live with doesn’t have any stars, and I don’t know why he goes on so. He insists that my giraffe is an “upstairs giraffe”, like it belongs in my upstairs fort at bedtime, but I think it also likes to go out in the rain, and get all soaking.

upstairs giraffe

In between hunting flies, we sometimes play tug-of-chew-toy. I’m better at it than he is.

That’s really all that’s going on. Sometimes the guy I live with does go out and work in the garden, during the brief periods when it either isn’t raining or he isn’t taking a nap, but mostly he just sits at the kitchen table and stares out into space. I do that sometimes, too.

I’ll let you go now, but before I do, I have a couple of movies for you. You might find them a bit avant garde, but these were taken at night, of course, and the eerie flickering is the wind chimes, which you can also hear. They’re pretty good if you embiggen them, too.

This one was taken from an ever-so-slightly different angle, as you can see when the wind chimes flicker. The guy I live with is so artistic, isn’t he?

Until next time, then.