Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest and greatest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “‘There Will Be Mud'”, and “Nest-Building Time”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose. I am aware that the postcard, which was from Malaysia, has slipped off its magnet on the refrigerator. Things like that happen here. (It got fixed later.)
Hardly anything has been going on. It’s been thundering, of course, except for one day, and so I decided I needed to be fed by hand, which the guy I live with does. I even get a napkin. It’s too scary to put your face into a dog food bowl when it’s thundering.
The guy I live with says more things would happen if I got up earlier than 9:45 in the morning, but I see no reason to do that. I understand I have to get up early on Tuesday, and go somewhere, so I might not post tomorrow, but then the guy I live with said after that I can sleep in until noon if I want to.
The sphaeralceas have started to bloom here. They’re related to hollyhocks and stuff, but have fairly small flowers. They grow without any watering, here, and the guy I live with really likes them, which is why they’re all over the place. This picture could have been more in focus, I think. 
And the perennial pea, Lathyrus latifolius. The guy I live with has tried to grow ‘White Pearl’, a favorite of Gertrude Jekyll’s, but it’s never made it.
I wasn’t going to show this allium because the guy I live with can’t remember its name, and for a person with a “photographic memory” that’s pretty sad, but he says, in his defense, that he is entering his declining years, and so that’s what we get.
Some garden pictures to make the post more interesting. Or longer.
The main rock garden. Only part of it, really. The part that looks empty in the lower left actually isn’t; the plants there are just little. 
The “lawn”. The yellow thing at the top of the picture is a sock thistle feeder, because the fancy one blew down and got bent, and the guy I live with has to put on his “Leonardo Cap” to try to figure out how to fix it.
What he calls a lawn is a bunch of native grasses and stuff, with a strip of buffalo grass for my convenience. 
The back lawn. This is entirely for my personal use. The buffalo grass is filling in nicely, in the lower right. The patches haven’t filled in yet completely, as you can see; they were seeded later. Mount Lindo in the distance. Kind of one of those “zen view” things, where you get a brief glimpse of the far-off mountain. (It isn’t really that far away; less than five miles. It’s 7,814 feet high.)
The guy I live with says this is an intensely melancholy view, but only when we have a sunset, which we haven’t had since early May, I think. I also think he’s a melancholy person by nature, and has become especially so in the last five years. I, on the other hand, am a delight.
There’s the perennial pea on the left. 
Oh, and this. I almost forgot. The guy I live with got another thirsty mouse picture. He changes the water all the time, because I occasionally drink out of the bird bath too, and I wouldn’t want it to taste like mouse lips.
I guess that’s all for today.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 