the miserable gardener

Greeting and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the most up-to-date news in the garden, except maybe today when I’m a couple of days late, but since you didn’t know it until now, it might still seem up-to-date. You may remember me from such posts as “It Raineth Every Day” and “A Change Of Pace”, among others.

Here I am not wanting to have my picture taken.

The guy I live with suggested I give today’s post this title because he thought of it. I know, that sounds strange. Just because you think of something doesn’t mean it’s worth sharing. He said he remembered getting mad at my mommy (he never stays mad for more than a few minutes) for throwing away the dust jacket on his old copy of Henry Miller’s Sunday After The War, and so, as he would say, “hence the title”. I guess. He also got mad when she accidentally broke the ashtray he had from the “21” Club, shades of Grace Kelly and Rear Window. His grandfather went there once, at least, and that’s how he got an ashtray from a place he’ll never go. She was all sorry and everything; just as sorry as he was when he chipped her polar bear sculpture.

That probably wasn’t very interesting. What was interesting is that it snowed the other night.

It wasn’t quite a winter wonderland by the time the sun filled the garden, but I liked it. Border collies love snow.

It melted shortly after that, but not much gardening happened that day.

Today, I decided to get up with what the guy I live with said was “getting up with the chickens”, which didn’t make much sense until the neighborhood rooster started crowing. Yes, there’s a rooster. It crows all day long. I don’t understand why there’s a rooster in the neighborhood, or why they call it “crowing” instead of “roostering”. Continuing with this fascinating train of thought, you might be amused to know that the guy I live with only realized last year why they call them “roosters”, because of course they roost, but then he wondered why they don’t call hens roosters, since they roost too. The guy I live with’s usual explanation, that life is strange, will probably do here, huh.

Anyway, this is what being up with the chickens is like, on a cool cloudy morning.

He took a few garden pictures, like last time, but they mostly came out “less subfusc” than he had anticipated. Here’s what the guy I live with insists is a lawn, not as subfusc as he had hoped it would be; taken about 5:30 in the morning. His new fence in the background.

Meanwhile, the guy I live with has been pondering the “postmodern garden exemplified by plantings kept to a minimum”, or so he says. It could just be that he’s losing his mind. I noticed on our walk the other afternoon that he had put on two different shoes, and somehow I didn’t think that would qualify as, you know, a Statement.

Nor is this. The guy I live with spent a lot of time sawing, and digging, and things like that, and when I came out to look what he was doing, this is what greeted me.

For one thing, you wouldn’t believe what this back border looked like ten years ago, before the guy I live with got all postmodern on it, but in truth, there are a lot of new plants here which you just can’t see. Mostly native grasses he grew from seed, and things like that. (You’ll probably wonder what I mean by “things like that”, but I don’t know; I only know it’s not all native grasses.)

So today, he added two poles to the Pole Garden. We don’t call it that, but if you weren’t really paying attention when the guy I live with showed pictures of owls sitting in the garden, we would say they sat on poles in the Pole Garden. You know how people say that gardens are “designed to be read”, well, this one isn’t. It has a definite purpose. It may look odd, but in reality, it’s completely utilitarian.

“And ornamental, of course.” Yes, very ornamental.

Whatever he says, huh. I learned that look from my mommy, who did the same thing when the guy I live with said stuff.

You can probably suspect where I learned to ramble on about not much of anything. At least you got to see two pictures of me. (Two rather cute pictures, if I do say so myself, which of course I do.) It started to rain and I got to go on my walk in the rain, and got completely soaking, so it was excellent. It’s supposed to snow a little tonight, too, which is equally excellent.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, really and truly, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here once again to delight and amaze you. You may remember me from such posts as “The Grape Bush” and “This And That”, among so many other genuinely remarkable posts.

Before I show a whole bunch of pictures of me, which in itself raises the quality of this otherwise kind of boring post to super-excellence, I should mention that we did almost nothing today, except go on our walks, take a long nap, and the guy I live with raked up honey locust pods. If I could operate the camera I could show pictures of him raking up pods, but that probably wouldn’t be very interesting.

What the guy I live with is obsessed about now is his new rock garden. This is how it looks through the not-incredibly-clean kitchen window, early in the morning.

You can see that the guy I live with hasn’t removed the wrapping he did on the Russian hawthorn. He’s so excited by this pile of gravel it’s almost all he talks about. He raves on about having drifts of Iris zaprgajewii and Crocus cvijicii, and possibly also Niedzwedzkia semiretschenskia. It doesn’t sound very promising.

So, along with that, he’s been dwelling on “the new English garden”. Planting kept to a minimum. A garden designed “to be read”. I can’t see that planting stuff like that mentioned above would necessarily make the garden readable. Sometimes when visitors came over and the guy I live with was at work, my mommy would call him and ask him what some plant was, and I could hear her saying things like “Can you spell that?” or “You’re just making that up”and stuff like that. I won’t be doing things like that.

Anyway, he was out there today making these artistic noises, so I came out to see what was going on. It isn’t very often that I hear artistic noises out in the garden, you know. The path I’m walking on was called “Pooka’s Shortcut”, because my uncle Pooka decided to make a shortcut through the garden rather than wasting valuable time running around the garden in order to see what was going on out in the back. Makes sense to me. My mommy added the boards, and made the guy I live with do all the sawing.

I got really close. Really, really close.

This is what was causing all the artistic noises.

“It looks better from the other direction’, he said.

My first impression was that he should stick to gardens with plants. Like, when he tells people he’s a gardener, and they automatically assume he means vegetables (or “edibles”, for crying out loud), when there aren’t any at all here, and he thinks it’s weird that people automatically assume things, but now, looking at this, and reflecting on current trends in gardening without plants, he says he might have to start telling people that his garden has plants in it.

Then he went into the side yard, the shade garden, to take a picture of a new form of Cyclamen hederifolium, “Arrow Leaf Silver”, or something like that. Yes, that’s really a cyclamen leaf. Only the guy I live with would take a picture of one leaf. (I know, there are two there, and some in the upper left, out of focus.)

Then, after taking this magnificent picture, he took a picture of the new rock garden as seen from the garden gate.

You can sort of see his artwork there in the distance. Distance it what it needs, don’t you agree?

Well, I guess that’s it. I hope you enjoyed the pictures of me, at least.

Until next time, then.