the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you up to date on all the things that have been happening here, which really don’t amount to much at all. You may remember me from such posts as “Another New Toy”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can tell by the kneeling bench and “kangaroo bag” behind me that some fairly serious gardening was going on today. The guy I live with gets tired pretty quickly, but still, he managed to get a bunch of stuff done.

It’s been so ridiculously hot for this time of year that we haven’t had much of anything to post about for quite a while.
The hummingbirds are all gone now. I kind of miss them. The guy I live with says it’s a sign that autumn is really here.

The guy I live with has been watering a lot, since it’s been so dry here after the last rain we had, and one day we got into a fight over the sprinkler. I may have won, but I got pretty wet.
Despite the fact that it’s been so hot, we’re starting to see some leaves turn color.
That green thing is the stand for the birdbath that broke; he keeps saying he’s going to get rid of that, like he keeps saying about a lot of things.

He took a couple of pictures of the garden in the bright sunlight.
The big deal here (for him but not for me) are the crocuses. This was a really poor year for autumn-flowering bulbs, especially the colchicums, of which there are a lot, but the crocuses are doing okay. There are some snowdrops in flower, too, but the crocuses are the main thing right now, for the guy I live with.
This is a pretty esoteric corner of gardening, so you’ll have to bear with me. I mean really bear with me.

The first thing to mention is that the most beautiful of the autumn-flowering crocuses, Crocus speciosus, doesn’t need this treatment if you plant them and water them right away (or if it, you know, rains).
“Speciosus” means “beautiful”, and has the root word “species“, meaning sort or kind. “Species” is a singular noun. (“Specie”, as the guy I live with has said before on this blog, refers to coins.)
The guy I live with has been ranting and raving lately (I just ignore him) about how English-speaking people pronounce this word.
It is pronounced spee-seez, not shpee-seez. This really drives the guy I live with crazy.

Anyway, the second thing is, the method of rooting these special (pronounced “spe-shul”, no H in that word either) crocuses has paid off.Recently some of the wild populations of Crocus speciosus have been segregated into species in their own right, based on the anthers, styles, and so on, and the guy I live with just had to have some of them.
I did tell you this was something esoteric, didn’t I?

Here are a few of them.
This is Crocus armeniensis:
This is Crocus puringii:
Crocus brachyfilus:
Crocus zubovii:
You may wonder about the pots. These are small pond baskets, plunged into the ground, to help protect the corms against voles and mice, and also so if the corms increase they can be shared with the botanic gardens here.

Someone from the botanic gardens came over this week and the guy I live with, who likes sharing, gave them some unusual snowdrops, Galanthus angustifolius and Galanthus samothracicus. He says rare stuff should be shared.

Back to crocuses. Crocus niveus is flowering too. This is from the Mani Peninsula in Greece, which of course was named after me.
A couple of days later all of them were in flower, and they got a temporary cage over them.
This is a grasshopper cage and will be replaced with a regular cage made from hardware cloth, to protect the overwintering leaves from rabbits, who love to eat the leaves down to the ground, which is a bad thing.
Crocus speciosus does not have overwintering leaves, but crocuses like the one above, and saffron crocuses like C. sativus do.
This one, Crocus pulchellus ‘Inspiration’, also does not have overwintering leaves. The leaves appear in spring, like they do with C. speciosus.
I think that’s it for today. I won’t talk much about the perfumed trash bags that the guy I live with accidentally bought and which are stinking up the patio, or the other odd things the guy I live with has been up to, since I forced all this crocus talk on you.
Just try to imagine what it’s like living with a nut like this.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here yet again to bring you up to date on all the latest news. You may remember me from such posts as “The Night Rain”, among at least a few others like that.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You can see that we have a lot of cowpen daisies. They’re a native annual and seed all over the place, and this year the guy I live with didn’t feel much like pulling out any extra seedlings since it’s been so roastingly hot for so long.

As you may be able to tell, it rained here. The guy I live with has been moping kind of silently about his upcoming anniversary, and also moping about the lack of rain, but a couple of days ago they predicted rain “for sure” and when nothing happened, he really started moping.
I went out to check, and there was nothing. This is me checking.
You can see that it sprinkled a little, but that was all.

The next morning we woke up and it had rained that night. We got three-quarters of an inch of rain. Rain at night is not all that usual here. The guy I live with was very pleased, and relieved too. This has been such a horribly hot and dry summer. I guess I should say “was”, because now it’s autumn.

So he took a few pictures of the garden after it was soaked.
This one has me in it, and the cowpen daisies.
There are a lot of colchicums in flower, though they were mostly knocked over by the rain.
This is Colchicum autumnale ‘Album’.
You can see that one flower has fallen apart.
The guy I live with said we get our word “album”, like a picture album, from the white slate notices were posted on by the ancient Romans.

The hummingbirds haven’t left for Mexico yet, and we have flowers for them.
This is Salvia ‘Raspberry Delight’, which he’s grown before, but never survived longer than a year or two. It seems happy now. Kind of a garish, unfocused picture, I know.
And Zauschneria ‘Ghostly Red’, just starting to flower.
The big buffet for hummingbirds is in the south garden, with Salvia greggii.
Speaking of birds, we have blue jays in the garden now.
They’re really noisy.

So that’s all I have for now. I’ll leave you with a picture of me patrolling along the path on the south side of the garden.

Until next time, then.