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 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.

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.