the miserable gardener

twinges of spring

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and most fascinating news from our garden. You may remember me from such other fascinating posts as “Inching Toward Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic, albeit slightly serious, pose.Today it was about seventy (70) degrees F (21.1C), sunny, breezy, and dry (eight percent humidity). It was pretty excellent.

Sometimes when the weather is this nice in winter, people here don’t know what to do. This is what you do.I also got my dinner al fresco this evening, and that was pretty good. I’ve decided that steak was way too much trouble to chew, so the guy I live with got me some stew in a can. What a hunter, huh. It’s salmon stew, really good, and I can pretend I’m stealing cat food while I’m eating it. My grandpa Flurry said that stealing the cat’s food was what he did when he was little. He sometimes got a lecture when he showed up with cat food breath, but not much of anything else happened.

And since it was so nice today, the guy I live with got all these twinges of spring and started moving plants around, which is mostly what he does in the garden.

He took some pictures, too. Here are the emerging multicolored leaves of Allium platycaule, from California.

Oh, and snowdrops, too. If you look closely you can see that some are different from others, with the little green marks on them. Some are more marked than others.

Here’s one not quite open, above a hellebore showing some color. That’s really it for today. Not much, just more snowdrop pictures.

I have some things to do now, so I’ll let you go.

Until next time, then.

an inch of time

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Abandoned House” and “The Grape Bush”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I guess I’m doing okay. The guy I live with says there’s a Zen saying that goes “an inch of time is worth a foot of jade”, though there are other variations of the saying, and that’s how we do things, day to day. We purebred border collies only live in the moment anyway.

But also it has a lot to do with how we experience the garden from now until about the first of June, because it keeps snowing until then. So if the guy I live with sees something in flower now, he gets all excited, instead of worrying that it might snow tomorrow. (It’s not even supposed to freeze for a whole week, or so I hear.)

All this is my introduction to what’s going on here, and if a certain party could focus more (in every sense), there would be more pictures, but at least I have some to show you.

For one thing, the first crocuses of the year poking their noses out of the ground. (The first ones he’s noticed, anyway.) This is Crocus “taurii“, which gets quotation marks because I guess it isn’t the real C. taurii, aka C. biflorus subsp. taurii…..whatever. This is a “spring” flowering crocus. (There really aren’t any crocuses that flower in spring here, but if I said “winter-flowering”, people would freak out and then I would have to say that I really meant “spring”, even though it’s winter.)The actual winter-flowering (or autumn-flowering) Crocus niveus, which has produced another flower. This is really late rather than early. The guy I live with feels it obligatory to tell people he has four forms of this crocus. I think he’s a snob of some sort. Well, he does have a purebred border collie, so I guess he is. Some color showing on Cyclamen coum.

More snowdrops.

Galanthus gracilis

There are way more snowdrops flowering than this, but you get the idea, maybe.

It’s a pretty nice day, and most of the snow that fell two days ago has melted. It should be all gone by the time it snows again. I’ll end my post with four extremely excellent garden pictures.