the miserable gardener

Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to tell you all about my fascinating day. You may remember me from such delightful and informative posts as “Guess The Weather” and “A Change Of Pace”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I just got back from my walk. And I mean just got back; you can see my harness hasn’t been put away yet. The walk was excellent, thank you.In fact, here I am on my walk. The sun had gone behind a cloud or something. The path ends beyond that patch of snow, and then we turn around. Here, the guy I live with had asked me a question, and I was thinking about the answer.The grass is still green. Some of it, anyway. This is Kentucky bluegrass. The guy I live with says that people who say it isn’t a native grass are wrong. This book was sitting on the front porch this afternoon. (It was in a box.)The guy I live with likes squishies (that’s what he calls them; he thinks it’s funny), but there has been a serious problem with them being eaten during the winter. He says it was voles. One minute the leaves are nibbled, and then the next, the whole plant is ripped out of the ground and devoured. My grandpa Flurry hated voles, and it wasn’t until after he passed away that the voles dared to come back into the garden. They seem to be gone now. The guy I live with says there’s too much sand and gravel in the garden for them. I’m not sure this is really true.

You know how people say things like “hardy in zone 5 with protection” or “drought tolerant with irrigation”? (The guy I live with says the first one means “not hardy in zone 5″ and the second means “not drought tolerant”.) Well, now we have “hardy until devoured”. He says that various species of Stomatium, Nananthus, Chasmatophyllum, etc., have been perfectly hardy here until someone ate them. (It wasn’t me.) He says he used to try to get my mommy to go out into the rock garden on nights in February (the weather was like this, pretty nice) and kneel down and smell the pineapple-scented flowers of a stomatium and she never wanted to. “But they smell like pineapple” wasn’t a big enough selling-point, I guess. The flowers smelled so much like pineapple that the plant was eaten soon after that. Pineapple is okay, but it’s not my favorite.

Anyway, the guy I live with says this is a dazzling book, written in the author’s usual witty, erudite style, with beautiful photographs, and he’s happy he got it. He purchased it here.

The squishies in the front garden, which he’s shown before, are fine, though maybe the flowers on the titanopsis (T. calcarea) won’t be blooming after all that below zero (F) weather early in December. Now he says he needs more, to try in this bed in the front yard. And Aloinopsis spathulata looks good, too.Squishies are really easy to grow from seed, the guy I live with says, and you can get most anything from Mesa Garden. Plants, too. And from Sunscapes.

Well, I think that’s all for today. Oh, the guy I live with says to say these plants are “not hardy in ‘zone Ate‘”, because he says that’s funny, but I don’t know ….. “Zone Ate, get it?” It really is time to go now.

Until next time, then.