Hello everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to show you what happened when I got left alone once again. You may remember me from such lonely posts as “Another Lonely Day”, “Guarding The Fort”, “Left Alone” (both posts with that name), “Home Alone Once Again”, and “Left Alone Again”, among so many, many others, not all of which I got left alone in, but in quite a few I did.
Here I am in a highly characteristic pose. Why anyone would want to leave me alone is beyond me.
Well, the guy I live with wasn’t really gone for very long. I know he doesn’t like to leave me. He went to Timberline Gardens again, mostly to see if he could lift a yucca he thinks he needs. He says if he can’t lift a plant, he can’t buy it, because if he bought some big, heavy plant, everyone who might help him would suddenly be called away on urgent business, and he’d have to wrestle the thing into place all by his lonesome. I don’t help either. I only herd, and, being retired, I don’t do much of that any more either.
So I have some pictures here. They could very well be pictures of the same things he takes pictures of every time he goes there, but maybe not.
Most of the hardy perennials weren’t outside on the tables yet, but some had been moved out. He went into the greenhouse (actually, the “cool house”) first.
Coleus. My mommy loved coleus and used to arrange them oh so artistically in the big pots which now stand empty in the garden here, because the things the guy I live with does and the word “artistically” are never used in the same sentence. 
Then into the greenhouse.
He went to get a yucca he could lift easily, one whose label said “Yucca faxoniana × carnerosana“, which I don’t have a picture of because he forgot to take one, but it looks kind of different, and could even be hardy. The yucca book by Fritz Hochstätter says that both species grow in west Texas, and are differentiated by the length of the perianth tube. Flora of North America says they are “genetically distinct” but doesn’t list Y. carnerosana for Texas, so …..(I don’t really care about any of this).
Anyway, he managed to get a picture of some seed-grown Yucca rostrata from Black Gap in western Texas, which sounds like a cowboy movie setting, and even the little plants have been completely hardy here, which is saying a lot. (The one called ‘Sapphire Skies’ has not been hardy here. He tried that twice.) 
He also had to go into the agave house to get some agaves, but didn’t take any pictures because I’ve already posted a bunch, but took a picture of the outdoor cactus frames.
Then, finally, to the heavy yuccas. These are Yucca faxoniana, which is completely hardy here, and the guy I live with doesn’t know why it isn’t planted more. Oh, that’s not true. He knows perfectly well why not.
He tried to lift this one, and he was able to. (Only a forklift can lift the one behind it.)
This one he couldn’t lift.
Well, so that was that. I think he’s not going to get one of these, but will wait until the one he does have grows a trunk. It does make him think of elephants. I’ve never seen an elephant, but I have seen the trunks down in the crawl space, and I can’t imagine what an elephant might look like after having seen those trunks, and the ones in the pictures here. Elephants must be really scary.
The best remedy for thinking about scary things, especially after a couple of hours of being left alone, is to spend some time in my fort.
I hope you enjoyed the nursery pictures.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 