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 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.

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 things seen and unseen. You may remember me from such posts as “Thirty-Three And A Third”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with has been painting every day, and I’ve had to watch him do it, but in this picture you can tell I’m not watching.
It’s also been windy and not very warm, so that doesn’t make for much fun in the garden.

Still, we have gone outside now and then, and the guy I live with took some pictures.
This is Colchicum bulbocodium (it used to be called Bulbocodium vernum):
There are cyclamen, too. Lots and lots of them.
These are Cyclamen coum, all self sown.
Well they’re not all Cyclamen coum, the plant in front is C. pseudibericum, but the flowers are those of C. coum. You can see the leaves of C. coum in the middle of the C. pseudibericum.
You can also see some snowdrops.

These are Galanthus alpinus var. bortkewitschianus, which is a sterile variety of regular G. alpinus.
The Kew book The Genus Galanthus says this variety occupies a very small area (about twelve to fifteen acres) in the wild in the north Caucasus and propagates itself vegetatively, which the guy I live with said was very weird indeed.
Then he saw this:
You can see how the bulbs are multiplying, so that’s how they must do it in nature.
(There’s a tiny cyclamen seedling and some crocus seedlings too.)

Besides these, there are still a lot of snowdrops in flower.
This is ‘Lapwing’:
This is ‘Mrs. Backhouse Number 12’:
Backhouse was the name of a nursery in England; there are other bulbs named for them, like the lily ‘Mrs. R.O. Backhouse’, and there’s a daffodil, too.

This is the green-tipped Galanthus nivalis ‘Warei’, an old variety which is slightly larger than ‘Viridapice’ (that name means “green tips”).
So those are the flowers. There are crocuses and irises in flower here too.

I got to watch the guy I live with paint the living room. He painted it the same colors as before, which were colors his wife picked out.
He had to move a bunch of books, which he’d never really looked at. There are a lot of books in this house that he’s never looked at, books that were his wife’s, that he can’t bring himself to get rid of. He just sees the spines of the books.
But the other day when he moved the books in the living room, he opened them. Dusted them, too.
His wife loved illustrated books. He knew it would make him sad to look at them, but he did it anyway.

There are also some old Everymen’s Library books. They have distinctive spines.

I know this post wasn’t mostly about me, which makes it less interesting in my opinion, but now the kitchen and living room are very clean, and mostly painted. There are some areas that need to be touched up.
The guy I live with is talking about getting new drapes for the living room, too, because he says “a certain party” chewed the bottoms of the drapes “when he was a puppy”.
I’m not sure who he’s referring to.

Until next time, then.