the miserable gardener

Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, here to bring you the latest and greatest news from our garden. You may remember me from such great posts as “Cactus And Snow” and “The Awful Smell”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I bet you wish you had your own personal rug so you could lie in front of the refrigerator, too. Wait, how about another picture of me before I go into the gardening news?I’m not sure which one I like better. Both are pretty good, if you ask me. You can’t really tell how blisteringly hot I was when I had my picture taken, but that’s because I’m tough.

It was blisteringly hot today, and the bindweed was blooming, as maybe you figured when you read the title of today’s post, and the upshot of this was that when the guy I live with saw all the flowers, he realized that he’d missed pulling a whole bunch of bindweed. Not that he went out and pulled it all. He just realized it.

We got up pretty early this morning, maybe 7:30, and one of the first things that he did after making my breakfast and starting the coffee was to take a morning picture from the back door. My mommy bought that green star. And the bird that’s on the railing. I got to go on both my walks, of course, and it was super extra blisteringly hot, which I liked, and then I spent most of the day napping. The guy I live with kept saying he was going to do some gardening, and he was outside for a little while, but I was asleep, so I don’t know if any genuine gardening took place, or if he just wandered around looking at things other than the flowering bindweed.

He says a lot of people are kind of strange, and one way you can tell that they are is that they don’t grow this plant. He pushed it over the sidewalk so you could see it in all its glory.Impressive, no? This is Matthiola longipetala (M. bicornis), the night-scented stock. You throw the seeds on the ground and they come up. The seedlings will overwinter, too.

This is what it looks like when the sun goes down. I don’t know why this picture is so grainy, but it is. (I think he pressed the wrong button before he took the picture.)Still not impressed? Well, you don’t grow it for its looks. What you grow it for is the intense scent of cloves and vanilla that perfume a very large area of the garden. The scent carries on the wind, too.

If we could do smells on the blog, you could smell the flowers, and then you’d want to get a packet of seed from a place like J.L. Hudson.

While he was out in front, which is where the stock plants are, he took a picture of the desert four o’clock, Mirabilis multiflora.There was something munching on the plant, too. The guy I live with said the caterpillar was eating the leaves like people eat corn on the cob. My mommy used to buy corn on the cob, soak it in water for an hour or so, and then grill it. She and the guy I live with would eat it with lots of butter, out on the patio, while I and my buddy Slipper tried to remind them that purebred border collies like buttered grilled corn on the cob a lot.

Um, let’s see. Oh, there are a couple of red penstemons blooming right now, in the back yard. (Four species, really, but only two got their pictures taken.)

Penstemon barbatus. (Self sown.)Another P. barbatus.Plenty of flowers for the hummingbirds.

I guess that’s it. Tomorrow is supposed to be super hot, too, so I’ll go on my walks and make the guy I live with think I’m going to pass out at any moment, when I’m really having a very good time, and then I can nap for the rest of the day.

I’m very good at napping.

Until next time, then.