the miserable gardener

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 Grape Bush”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.I guess I’m feeling okay now. The guy I live with got me an appetite stimulant (yes, another pill), and so now he’s been having to go get me roast turkey breast and make rice for me, because apparently the pill makes me want “people food”, but he says that’s okay with him. He even smoked a salmon so I could have some. It was good.

Oh, and the bell there? Maybe I’ve said before, but that was put in by my mommy so my grandpa Flurry could ring the bell with his nose when he needed to go outside. I don’t use it, because the back door is almost always open these days. Even in winter.

Doesn’t the light behind me look all autumnal and Halloween-y? I even have a crocus with that name, to show you now.

Crocus cartwrightianus ‘Halloween’

That’s another crocus you can get saffron from, if you didn’t know.

Hardly anything has happened around here that hasn’t been totally centered around me. So you know things are fairly excellent. A couple of nights ago, the back door was closed, and the guy I live with got all scared and stuff because there was a loud crash in my fort, which you can see from the first picture is right next to the chair which the laptop sits in front of, and what had happened was that I saw a black cat on out the patio, looking in right at me, and I got so startled I hit my head on the roof of my fort. I was okay, though.

It’s really yellow around here. I can see yellow, so I know. The biennial from Utah, Oenothera longissima, got devoured by flea beetles this past summer, and the guy I live with totally gave up on it, but look what’s happening now. (He forgot to take the fallen leaf out of the flower on the right.)The honey locust has completely turned color now.And the Wasatch or canyon maple, Acer grandidentatum, has turned too. We have a lot of grape vines around the garden. Birds sowed these, by pooping out the seeds, according to the guy I live with. They’re Vitis riparia. 

The oldest one has climbed up into the “desert bamboo” (Fontanesia fortunei) almost twenty feet, but you can only really see how far up it goes at this time of year. This picture was taken looking more or less up. The guy I live with said that “a golden afternoon” might be a good title, because there’s a book called that too, and it could make us look more sophisticated if we occasionally included a literary reference.

He also said, like I haven’t heard this five hundred times before, and even posted about it before, that Gertrude Jekyll rhymed her last name with “treacle”, and that her parents were friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, which is where he got the name for his story, even though it’s mispronounced all the time. There’s not much we can do about that, according to the guy I live with. He says the same things over and over again; all the time, too.

Oh, it’s a pretty enjoyable book, by the way.I guess that’s all. The guy I live with said I’m very good at making posts out of nothing, but, to be literary again, I would remind him that when someone asked Yeats how he wrote a particular poem, he replied “I made it out of a mouthful of air”, and so there you have it. 

Until next time, then.