the miserable gardener

Halloween

Greetings everyone, and boo. Yes, once again, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, who’s totally against anything even remotely scary. You may remember me from such posts as “A Close Call” and “The Happy Elephant”, among so many others.

Here I am in a characteristically noble pose. I know I have something on my nose, but I don’t think it detracts much from the essential nobility.

Hardly anything has been done in the last couple of days. Those are the best kind of days. The guy I live with got a few lily bulbs in the mail from B&D Lilies, and planted them yesterday. “The roots go at the bottom”, he said, which was good to know. He’s not much into lilies but they had some species lilies (Lilium martagon) which, of course, being a snob and all, he had to have.

He admits that he also got bulbs of a hybrid, ‘Mrs. R. O. Backhouse’, which these are bulbs of. (The guy I live with says that isn’t proper English, but I typed it anyway.) They’re supposed to be planted in “deep, leafy soil” which he doesn’t have any of, either. (So there.) This is despite 25 years of working leaves and stuff into soil to get “leafy soil”, but nothing has really happened. Like when gardening books say to dig in a bunch of “leaf mold” and the guy I live with makes all these phone calls to get some and no one knows what he’s talking about even though he read it in a book, so it must exist.

He did not get the lily with the color of women’s old underwear, which he still wants, but nobody has. The lily, not the underwear. You know, Lilium × testaceum, the Nankeen lily, supposedly the same color as Queen Isabella’s underwear which she refused to change until the siege of someplace or other was lifted, and, well it’s not really a true story anyway, even though it’s been told before on this blog (telling it twice doesn’t make it true), but the color, isabelline, is real. “Who doesn’t like a good underwear story in the middle of talking about gardening?” the guy I live with said, and I think the answer would be me.

The guy I live with did spend some time bolting the fence around “the enclosure”, or at least the part that’s falling over, or part of the part, and then he got this “brilliant” idea to cut some champagne bottles in half and use the bottom halves as sort of stepping stones, or something like that. He’s not sure he likes the way these look, but he says he’ll cut more tomorrow and maybe show pictures and everyone can see how awful this really looks. Picasso he is not.

So it’s Halloween. My least favorite holiday after Fourth of July. Scary little kids coming to the door again and again. The guy I live with is desperately trying not to eat all the Kit Kats he bought for the kids, but it could be a losing battle.

It’s really windy and kind of chilly, dry leaves are blowing all over the place, and so we have a movie sort of showing that. It isn’t scary or anything, not like “The Conjuring” which the guy I live with saw recently and said was really scary, but at least it is seasonal.

The guy I live with put off raking leaves because the forecast said it would be windy, and he says “wind is a good way of getting rid of leaves” except that they’re blowing into the garden, not out of it. Well, what can you do?

I guess that’s all. Maybe tomorrow he’ll have something interesting to say. It has to happen eventually, huh.

Until next time, then.

the seed whisperer

Hello everyone; once again, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to provide with posts which are both informative and delightful. You may remember me from such posts as “One Thing Follows Another” and “As Above, So Below”.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, on this dark and chilly day.

I made the guy I live with get up at 5:40 this morning because I wanted my breakfast. It was still dark, and so, probably just to spite me, he made me wait until it got lighter (I wouldn’t say that the sun came up) before we went on our walk. So to spite him I made it into a really long walk, on a dark, drizzly morning, and his shoes got soaking wet.

He was happy that I’ve been feeling so chipper (I even wanted to chase the min pin who walks in the field, this afternoon), but not so happy that his shoes got all wet, and after a while he went out in the car and I stayed at home. This was ostensibly to go get me some more biscuits, which I need a lot of, but he had an ulterior motive, which I’ll expose right now.

The guy I live with went to a nameless garden at an undisclosed location in order to swipe some seed. He didn’t tell me if he employed a fake accent and wore a disguise but I wouldn’t be surprised. My mommy thought this was all completely ridiculous and she would just brazenly swipe seed without a care in the world, but he doesn’t have her around any more to tell him that fake accents and disguises really aren’t necessary, because hardly anyone cares.

That’s the guy I live with’s (aka Mister X’s) finger there. Driving away from the garden, he was certain that a black SUV was tailing him, and he was about to take evasive action when the SUV passed him and turned out to be green.

Well, here’s the informative part. (You can just skip this if you want.)

This is Vernonia larseniae. It was originally named as Vernonia lindheimeri var. leucophylla by Esther Louise Larsen, “collected along the Sanderson-Sheffield Road, twelve miles from Sanderson, Terrell County, July 19, 1921” in Texas. It was later renamed for her, as V. larseniae, in 1978.

The guy I live with even went so far as to email the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to get the name spelled right http://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=VELA3 because it was spelled “larsenii”, which is male. As you can see, they fixed it today.

So then, he did some more Googling, and Sanderson, Texas, is USDA Zone 8b. Vernonia, the guy I live with says, has a reputation for difficult-to-germinate seed, and he wondered why a plant growing in Zone 8b might need cold treatment like some of the online stuff suggests. He’s still wondering. (He also wonders why this zone 8b plant is hardy here and most other zone 8b plants aren’t.)

For someone who just germinated some manzanita seed after chipping it and five months stratification in the refrigerator, he certainly seems to have patience. At least for seeds, anyway.

Whew, huh. To make up for this, here are some pictures of the garden the guy I live with took about 6:30 this morning. Things have changed since the last time he took pictures.

You can see where my buddy Slipper gnawed the 4×4 when he got excited, like he was a giant, nefarious rodent. The star is still leaning after I pointed it out the last time.

This is Abies lasiocarpa ‘Arizonica Compacta’, or some such thing.

He took the tree wrap off the Russian hawthorn.

He put up a bird feeder, which you can see behind the hanging solar lantern, and Earl jumped up there and knocked all the seed out of the feeder. The guy I live with was pretty ticked off, and took down the feeder. He’ll put it up tomorrow in “a place where squirrels can’t get to it”, wherever that might be.

The spindle tree, Euonymus europaea, has turned dark red in the last couple of days.

The enclosure, with the Big Metal Chicken. The bright red is Cotoneaster horizontalis.

Crataegus douglasii lighting up the “way back” garden.

Then looking back toward the house, on the path by the North Border. If you look extra closely you can see the new arbor the guy I live with is building, almost out in the front yard, behind the one my mommy built. Hers will be sturdier, I’m sure.

What else? Well, it’s almost Halloween, which was my mommy’s favorite holiday after Christmas. She would sit downstairs with the two of us, me and my buddy Slipper, while the guy I live with gave out candy at the front door, and we barked a lot. This year he bought a bunch of candy and, um, had to go get more on his trip out this morning.

I guess I’ll go now. I hope you enjoyed at least part of this.

Until next time, then.

the miserable gardener

Halloween

the seed whisperer

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