the miserable gardener

freak-out 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 and greatest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Barrow Of Fear” and “Below Normal”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I was hot, and panting, which possibly explains the focus issue. I can’t explain it in the other pictures.Well, practically nothing has been going on lately, except for the guy I live with constantly complaining about the lack of sun here. Oh, and the fact that I’m starting new meds next week and they cost a bundle of money. They’re supposed to help me lose weight. He says I’m worth it, which is good.

The weather has been the same here for a very long time. I could post pictures, but they wouldn’t look any different from the last bunch of gray, cloudy, dismal sky pictures I posted. I’m constantly worried that it will thunder and that I might get hit by lightning, but the guy I live with says not to worry. I do anyway.

I thought I’d post a picture of our front lawn, to prove that we have one. I’ve shown pictures of it before, but now it’s “peaking”, according to the guy I live with. We have a lawn that peaks. He says the reddish flagstone “strikes a discordant note”. I think he gets that from reading a lot of Graham Stuart Thomas. The scrub oaks have acorns on them. For now, of course. They get eaten.

Quercus undulata

But other than that, our days are kind of the same. We like it that way. There has been one change, though, and that happened at night. Late the other night, at Tinkle Time, when I went out into the “way back” with the guy I live with, to tinkle right before bedtime, I heard this noise that sounded like of like “Hghjblblblblblgggghhhhhaaaaa!” Something like that. Then there was a bunch of hopping up and down and much waving of the arms.

The guy I live with had walked into one of these.Coming upon a three-foot-long yellow-bellied racer and a four-foot-long bullsnake in the garden were nothing, but this, entirely different story.

The guy I live with claimed, later, that all the commotion he made was “an expression of regret for having destroyed such a thing of beauty”. You bet.

I’m just glad I’m not that tall.

Until next time, then.

some flowers, for once

Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, Chess the weather-traumatized 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 “Guess The Weather” and “It Raineth Every Day”, among so many, many other weather-related posts.

Here I am in a characteristically traumatized pose. I was sure I was going to be hit by lightning today, but as you can see, I wasn’t. This what my back yard looked like around one in the afternoon, yesterday. It thundered for hours yesterday. What it looked like at the same time, today.And right before my dinner time. It thundered for hours again today. I was fairly bummed out, as the guy I live with says they used to say in a time called “the Sixties”. The guy I live with, though, went out into the garden, “to fearlessly take pictures”. Ever since he read that the split infinitive was a made-up rule, he splits them left and right. He said the blog could use some flower pictures, for once. “To easily give it more class.”

He bought a bunch of oreganos from a mail-order nursery in California a couple of years ago and either lost the labels or buried them with the plants. I know, hard to believe.

This one (below) has a label. “Lizzie’s Hybrid No.2”.

Here’s Salvia ‘Maraschino’, a hybrid between Salvia microphylla and S. grahamii. The guy I live with says that S. grahamii (and S. lemmonii) are now considered to be S. microphylla, so this is a hybrid with itself, I guess. It likes a lot of water at this time of year, and might be better in one of the sand piles. (This was supposed to be in focus…..)A salvia which was labeled ‘Dark Dancer’, but it isn’t. It’s been here for ages. (Flower of Achnatherum scribneri, grass, on the left.)An agastache of the A. cana type. Coronado Red, again. Also not hugely in focus. I should learn how to take pictures, I think, because my eyesight is certainly better than you-know-who’s. Salvia blepharochlaena.Incarvillea olgae. This is a tall one, but could use more water….The first of the Cyclamen hederifolium.The sphaeralceas in the way back. The flag is to remind the guy I live with to water something he just planted. Oh, I know, Asclepias latifolia. The big orange one, again, that he now thinks might not be Sphaeralcea incana, though it looks mighty like it. Muhlenbergia dubia and Sphaeralcea munroana. Okay, that’s all the flowers. The guy I live with says it might be nicer if it rained instead of just thundered for hours, but you can’t have everything. Eventually the clouds headed east “where they belong” (so farmers can get the rain, he says), and I got to go on my afternoon walk. (The guy I live with said that was a metaphor. I’m tired of metaphors.) Look how green the weeds are. I guess that’s all for today.