the miserable gardener

Hello everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to tell you all about my exciting day in the garden. You may remember me from such fascinating posts as “The Front Yard” and “A Close Call”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose. Here I am, stepping in something. Yes, this can even happen to purebred border collies.

Anyway….they said it was supposed to snow tonight. It’s tonight now, and it’s snowing, but before that, well, it wasn’t, as you can see, and so the guy I live with took some pictures of the snowdrops just to prove he has snowdrops.

There will be a much bigger display later, or at least the guy I live with says there will, but for now, he’s perfectly content seeing a few snowdrops in bloom. See, Denver has these weird winters, where it snows, then eventually the snow melts (really, it evaporates), and it gets really nice and warm for a few days, and then it snows again. This is one of those “then it snows again” times.

Here’s one of the rock gardens. The path on the right is really icy so he sprinkled some sand on it so I wouldn’t slip. He says he’s going to do something about that path later this year. What, I don’t know. That’s a fastigiate blue spruce all tied up. I probably said that before. Oh, I did, because he’d done such a bad job and had to fix it. The path on the north side of the garden (below). It gets more sun than the south side, which is why he keeps taking pictures of it. The thing that’s fallen over on the left is a cage for a little oak from Palo Duro Canyon. Squirrels try to dig up the little oaks because the acorn is sometimes still there. And that’s an Arizona cypress wrapped in burlap.

About the burlap. The guy I live with says that until conifers have developed a root system that’s sufficiently large as to equal the above-ground foliage, they benefit from being wrapped. He does occasionally water the needles for the first couple of winters. That’s right, the needles. I keep saying he’s kind of a nut but in this case he says he knows what he’s doing.

The shrub framed by the arbor is the lilac, ‘Annabel’, which could be in bloom in about ten weeks. That’s nice to think about.

You may also wonder about the upturned flower pots in the middle there. I wonder too.

Whatever, huh. Since they said it was supposed to snow tonight, the guy I live with did some furious seed sowing. Or, I should say, furious sowing of seed. The seed wasn’t furious. Here are some pots with a mix including calcined clay, for various species of xylorhiza. The xylorhizas are woody asters and he’s had trouble getting them to grow. In the wild they mostly grow in clay.

Here are the seed pots in the frame, ready to be snowed on. Being snowed on is good. The window screen is to protect the pots from being washed out by heavy rain. We occasionally do have heavy rain, but not in winter, that’s for sure.

Well, I didn’t really have much to say, as maybe you can tell, so why not finish this post with a few excellent pictures of me. This is me looking at something. This little triangle-shaped bed has flat rocks and native grasses. Maybe I’m looking at one of the grasses.

Here I am walking down the path, avoiding the ice. There isn’t very much planted at the end of the bed behind me, because, well, because there isn’t. Some plants got removed because the guy I live with got tired of them. I’m not worried that he’ll get tired of me, though. I walked up the path, and then down again, because you can see paw prints. Of course I had to walk down the path first.

And, lastly, me heading back to the house. I don’t know why the guy I live with hasn’t done anything about the chicken wire cage lying on the ground, but he hasn’t. We have a lot of chicken wire cages in the garden. Some people think this is weird, or even unattractive, but we have rodents. Or, he says, “Could it be that the rodents have us?”

Until next time, then.

 

Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to tell you all about my day. You may remember me from such delightfully heuristic posts like “Weeding Day” and “Three Percent Humidity”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

Now, even though I decided to title today’s post “Nothing Gets Done”, something really did get done, namely, the guy I live with took our car in for its checkup. You know, oil change and tire rotation and stuff like that. He used to work on cars by himself but he doesn’t any more.

You should have seen how agitated he was. It was like he was leaving and never coming back. I guess he thought it was going to take hours and hours and I’d miss my dinner and eventually realize I was going to be left alone for the rest of my life, because he was still waiting at the car dealer’s for a part that only one tiny factory made by hand, and it was made of bactiolite, a rare metal, which they were out of, and had to order from a small mine somewhere in central Africa, where there was an uprising or something, because no one had heard from the mine owners in a very long time, even though there was this metallurgist in Finland who was working on synthesizing this very rare metal, but didn’t expect delivery until the year 2075, by which time the guy I live with probably wouldn’t be driving much, so he was afraid he would have to wait.

It took about an hour, and then he was back, and I was glad, as usual.

So I don’t have pictures of what today was like. It was a very nice day and the snow is melting fast. Oh, it snowed, since I haven’t posted for a couple of days.

But, ever resourceful, the guy I live with found some of my mommy’s pictures, and I’ll post some right now. Here’s one of my buddy Slipper, looking down, and my grandpa Flurry, and me. I’m the cute one with the red collar. You can see what good front door guards we were.

What an excellent start for a post. I don’t know what my buddy Slipper was looking at, though.

Now, I’ll show some flower pictures, because I have to, if I show lots of pictures of me.

We don’t grow that anemone any more. It gets blister beetles and they devour the whole plant in a day. And besides, it needs way too much water in our garden. But we do have some more anemones, namely, Anemone blanda. They’ve seeded around in the garden here. (You may have noticed I’m going alphabetically, too.)

Now a bunch of campanulas.

Now our native corydalis. It appears it various places from year to year. I think that’s kind of neat.

Okay, now this is a really weird thing. The guy I live with grew this as a house plant, but it looks like something from a completely different plant. Dorstenia gigas, he thinks. That’s the flower. Really and truly. I think it’s scary. The guy I live with says it reminds him of the scary movies they used to have back in the 1950s when monsters from outer space would come into your neighborhood and smash up stuff and try to grab you. He was sometimes afraid of being grabbed by something that might have looked a little like this.

Here’s the last picture for today, a nice one of Gentiana acaulis. It actually is that color. I know because I can see blue.

Well, that’s all I have for today. I hope you enjoyed these pictures. My mommy took them with her Olympus camera, which ran on AA batteries. “Almost like it ran on coal”, the guy I live with said.

Wait, no, here’s another picture, of me, no less. That’s right, me, when I was really little. This might have been my first day here, back when there was a green lawn, and my tummy is on it, since I’d never seen a green lawn before, and had to make sure my tail was still attached, or something. I was super cute, as you can see.

Until next time, then.