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 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.

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 what’s been going on here. You may remember me from such posts as “Nature Is Icky”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I was guarding our trash, to make sure no one stole it, but, as usual, a big truck came and stole the trash while I was watching. I don’t know why this happens every week, but it does.

I’ve been gone for much longer than I ever have been, but I couldn’t think of anything much to say except how hot it is. Imagine a post every day with me complaining about how hot it is.
That’s because it’s been hot. It’s supposed to be 90 degrees (32C) tomorrow, and while that’s not unusual for September here, it is annoying. (The guy I live with used another word.)

The guy I live with has been watering more than he has since the garden was all green and needed constant water, about twenty years ago. He said grasshoppers mostly attack drought-stressed plants. So now we have what he says is the largest cowpen daisy (Verbesina encelioides) on the planet.
It’s taller than he is.
He says the flowers are scented of “unsweetened chocolate”, whatever that is.
This is a self-sowing native annual.

A few days ago the guy I live with began to inspect the potted crocuses. You can see, on the right, that a flowering stalk is emerging (it’s Crocus mazziaricus), but when he poured everything out of the pot, the corm still didn’t have any roots, which isn’t part of the plan. This one was growing some roots.
This is how it should be, so the corm can form little cormlets, later. Otherwise this will be the end of the crocus.
I showed you Crocus suworowianus a while back, with the corms planted on their sides, and those did start to flower, and grow roots, so they were planted into the garden.
So the rest of the potted ones will get more water until they grow roots.
We certainly can’t count on rain here, these days.

Yesterday two people came from the botanic gardens and took three empty troughs, so there are only six left in the garden, I think. The guy I live with said this was “the end of an era”, but it didn’t make him sad.
At one time there were three dozen troughs here, filled with alpine plants, but they needed daily watering in the summer, and eventually everything died.
In return, he was given a couple plants of Atraphaxis virgata, from Central Asia. These are giant buckwheats that will grow with no watering at all. We have one atraphaxis here already; a different species.
The cage is becauise a squirrel got way too interested in the one not yet planted.

Today, the guy I live with decided to move some self-sown plants of Aster oblongifolius. (He said he wasn’t going to type the new name, “syhmp” something.)
This is a pink-flowered one similar to ‘Dream of Beauty’ introduced by Claude Barr.
These transplant very easily, even in summer.

That’s almost all I have to talk about, except for what happened on my evening walk along the canal.
I was convinced that there was something in the water. The guy I live with didn’t think so, but this is my area of expertise, and I was really sure.
I would have gone in, but the water was very muddy, because we got half an inch of rain a few days ago, and every time it rains the water in the canal is muddy.

When we went back on the other side, on our way home, I needed to check that side, too, but the guy I live with still said no going in the water. Here I am not looking at the water.
I’m not standing in grass, but in sedges. I’ve never stood in sedges before, and as you may know, sedges have edges.
I think that brings you up to date. Tomorrow is supposed to be a smoky day, which will be no fun, especially since we can’t have the bedroom window fan on.
The air conditioner is cooler, of course, but noisier.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me taken last night.

Until next time, then.