the miserable gardener

a hot day

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 “Below Normal” and “Revenge Of The Rodents”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose. The bunches of grass and stuff in front of me is what the guy I live with calls our “lawn”. It was really hot today, though the guy I live with says it wasn’t all that hot, that I was just being a wimp. For one thing, he insisted on shampooing the carpet again (I have told you, repeatedly, that he’s kind of a nut), which raised the humidity in the house to about a zillion percent, and for another thing, I wasn’t the only one who thought it was hot.Two against one. It was hot.

Some time yesterday these plants appeared on the patio.When my mommy was here, she would have asked, in a voice rather louder and more stern than usual, where exactly all these plants were supposed to go, since the garden is a bit full as it is. There are two manzanitas (Arctostaphylos pungens) on the left, four oaks (Quercus undulata), and a mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus breviflorus).

I thought we already had a Cercocarpus breviflorus.The guy I live with said that this one was possibly a hybrid, between Cercocarpus breviflorus and C. montanus. So of course we had to have “the real thing”, too.

He also said, when I wondered about the oaks, that he had this idea. I was thrilled. “Lawn oaks”, he said. You can see one of the little oaks in the very first picture, out of focus on the right. Okay, I admit, not very many other people have lawn oaks. You may be able to tell that the guy I live with has recovered from the trauma of the week before last. Partly recovered, anyway. He says the lawn oaks will be a big help.

Well…..I’ll change the subject now, and show some plant pictures.

Haberlea rhodopensis

This next one, “Viette’s dwarf form” of comfrey, isn’t very dwarf, but has been here “since before there were border collies”, that is, in the Dark Ages here, back when the guy I live with desperately wanted a watered, “eastern-style” garden, which didn’t work out as well as he thought it would, this climate being “noted for general awfulness” and all that other whiny stuff. Whatever, huh. The garden isn’t like that at all any more, but the comfrey still lives. I’m not sure what he was focusing on here. Let’s keep going.

Penstemon cyananthus

Gymnocalycium baldianum

Echium amoenum, extra cherry-red form

Salvia phlomoides

So that was our day. I roasted, and the guy I live with took pictures and planted oaks in the lawn and did other stuff. I guess tomorrow will be about the same. Oh well.

Until next time, then.

before the storm

Greetings and salutations everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to bring you the latest and most interesting news from our garden. You may remember me from such interesting posts as “Gloomy Weather” and “A Moment Of Fear”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a squinting pose. The sun was out today, briefly. It’s thundering over the mountains, to the west, and the forecast is for “heavy rain”. I don’t like thunderstorms. The guy I live with says that maybe this summer won’t be like last summer, where I heard thunder almost every day.

Yesterday was hot, and some of us didn’t like it much. Other creatures just clung to stuff. Clinging to stuff is a good refuge, sometimes. This is the white-lined sphinx again. Here’s Echinocereus triglochidiatus var. mohavensis forma inermis–no, seriously–flowering. The guy I live with grew this from seed. Inermis, by the way, doesn’t mean “really big”, it means “without spines”, though as you can see this plant has spines, which is why some botanists say it should just be called ‘Inermis’ or “the spineless form”, but of course only when it really is spineless. That’s an asphodel in the way, there.And the pink form of Echinocereus coccineus. He messed up the color on this one, a little. Buds on Gymnocalycium baldianum.Anyway, today, the guy I live with decided that it was time to move the seed pots around. Some of the little plants are beginning to need more sun (though this doesn’t seem like the place to talk about sun, these days), and so he started to move pots. He moved a few, while I watched, and then realized this was going to be a lot more work than he thought, and so he stopped.

This seed pot almost got thrown out.That little green thing is Phlox opalensis, a highly desirable rock garden “microphlox”, and it was saved.

But he also took a bunch of pictures of seedlings, which I’m supposed to show you, even though most people would consider this to be boring. “If you don’t include some boring parts, the interesting parts won’t seem as interesting”, he told me, and though I doubt this, here goes anyway.

Oh, and by the way, if you’ve never heard of these plants, that’s okay. Neither had I. The guy I live with said that “some are so rare they’ve never even heard of themselves”, which made me feel better, I guess.

Acantholimon curviflorum

Dianthus pumilus subsp. arpadianus

Achillea umbellata

Alyssum dasycarpum

Matthiola anchoniifolia

Jurinea cadmea

Anthemis cretica subsp. leucanthemoides

Achillea sipkorensis

Whew, huh. A whole bunch of Turkish alpine plants. Also he has a “bumper crop” of bitterroots, Lewisia rediviva.

Lewisia rediviva

So that’s it. Not to end on a boring note, here’s a picture of me lying under the kitchen table. It’s a pretty good place to be when it thunders. Or when I’m not in my fort, or lying beneath the living room window guarding stuff, or just at any time of the day. That’s really all I have for today. I hope you weren’t too hugely bored looking at all the seedlings. The guy I live with says he hopes it rains, but just rains, if you know what I mean, but not so much that the creek floods. He wants everything just so, doesn’t he?

Until next time, then.

the miserable gardener

a hot day

before the storm

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