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 some pictures of our garden before it gets frozen solid. You may remember me from such posts as “Carpets” and “The S Word”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. I regret to say that this wasn’t a day for totally focused pictures, but I think you can still tell it’s me.
They say it might freeze tonight, though maybe not for our garden, since we’re so close to the foothills, and when cold weather comes from the west, it stays warmer over here because of the westerly winds, so, we’ll see. (When cold weather comes from the north, forget it.)
Here’s the cold weather. This is looking west-southwest. 
The guy I live with thought it might be appropriate to take some garden pictures, just in case. Some of these aren’t hugely in focus, either, but it started to rain a little, and he said it was hard to hold the camera and an umbrella at the same time. (Yes, we have an umbrella.)
I’m in the next couple of pictures, which of course makes them really excellent. In the second one, there’s practically nothing in focus, but you still get the autumnal effect. 
The rarely-photographed path to the “way back”, by the shed.
The rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ is blooming in the little garden, my mommy’s garden, on the right. The garden starts right by the post, there. 
And the willow aster, Aster praealtus, elsewhere in the garden. This starts flowering really late. (We’re not going to say “Symhphtytrhm” or anything like that; we say “aster”.)
The redbud is all yellow now. This one is from Oklahoma. I’m not sure that makes a difference. 
And the spindle tree, Euonymus europaea.
And what’s really flowering like crazy are the various selections of Salvia greggii. They either like the shorter days or the cooler weather. Maybe both. 
Oh, well, time for the big news. If you read the blog before I took it over (I know, like why would you, but, say you did), you’ll remember the trellis and the state of disrepair which it was in, well, look at it now.
The guy I live with bought some lath, and spent some time rebuilding the whole thing. The only really weird thing about this job is that the ones slanting from upper left to lower right are inside on the left panel, and outside on the right. Oh, and the panel on the left is narrower than the one on the right. My mommy would not have approved of this faulty arrangement, and would have made the guy I live with redo the whole thing according to her exact specifications. Or she would have done it herself.
“We’re not building the Taj Mahal”, after all,” the guy I live with would say, when they worked on things together.
But, of course, they were.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 