the grape bush

Posted on September 29, 2013 by paridevita

Greetings and salutations everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie. You may remember me from such posts as “May Day” and “Pictures Of Me”, among so many others.

Here’s another picture of me, in what the guy I live with says is the most characteristic pose of all.

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Well, so what if I lie around a lot. Someone has to do it.

There’s not much to talk about today, anyway. Here’s another picture of Crocus kotschyanus ‘Reliant’.

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The guy I live with says that the name ‘Reliant’ sounds like a British dreadnought. He’s so funny. It’s really called that because some forms of this species rarely if ever flower.

The big deal right now is the grape bush, Vitis acerifolia, which is new to the garden. I’m going to call it the grape bush because that’s what my mommy would have called it, and the guy I live with would have countered with bush grape, which he would say is what it’s really called, and then she would have said grape bush, and he would have said bush grape, and on and on. Finally he would have stood out in the middle of the yard, turning all purple and stuff just like a grape, and yelled bush grape at almost the top of his lungs, and then after the echo died down we would have heard a tiny little voice from another part of the yard say grape bush and it would have started all over again.

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You can see it’s already turning color from the cool nights. Very autumnal, I say. An autumnal grape bush.

The guy I live with says it’s also called the “panhandle grape”, which could either mean the Texas Panhandle or the Oklahoma Panhandle, depending on which panhandle you were standing in, I guess, because it comes from both places. Also southeastern Colorado. It’s not a vine, either. It’s a bush, which you might not have known if you started reading the post way down here.

You might also not know that the garden is filled with grape vines; mostly the native grape, Vitis riparia, and some regular grapes, and the canyon grape, Vitis arizonica. Raccoons get all the grapes, though the guy I live with says he might make dolmades some day. (Not after the leaves fall off, though.) But the one that’s turning all golden right now is a bush. A grape bush.

So that’s the big news on this very busy day. Until next time, then.

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a futile effort

Posted on September 28, 2013 by paridevita

Hello everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to tell you about my day, which includes part of yesterday, because it just does. You may remember me from such posts as “Leafage And Branchage” and “This And That”, among many other delights. I’ll talk about “This And That” again, in just a bit.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.

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Don’t I look delightful? Well, I am.

Anyway, about “This And That” first off. I showed a picture of Salvia darcyi in that post, and said how it wasn’t a synonym of S. oresbia. Well, it isn’t. They thought it was oresbia when they first discovered it, and then realized it was an entirely new species, S. darcyi. Why the confusion persists I don’t know, except that it is humans I’m talking about, so that says a lot. “It is known only from the type locality in the Sierra Madre Oriental range of northeastern Mexico and was found growing among limestone rocks, a large colony of it filling a ravine at 2800 m.  The ravine was 14 km west of Galeana, approximately 50 km southeast of Saltillo in Coahuila State and 60 km south of Monterey in Nuevo Leon State.” (Botanical Magazine, Volume 11, issue 2, page 52…..and yes, they did spell Monterrey wrong.)

So ….well, I better show the salvia before I forget ….the guy I live with says this is interesting, but I don’t know to whom……

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…..Salvia oresbia was collected much further south in the state of San Luis Potosí in the 1870s, so it’s really a completely different species. (The guy I live with, who insists on this stuff, says that the specimen Muller 2208, collected in 1935 at Galeana, might be S. darcyi.) Anyway, he says for people to quit linking these two.

Whew. You know, sometimes a purebred border collie just wants to go into his fort after stuff like this. But there’s more.

There was a freeze warning last night, at about 9 p.m. Why there couldn’t have been one earlier, the guy I live with didn’t know, but he went out and brought all the plants into the garage, in the dark. And of course it didn’t freeze, so he put them all back outside this morning. “Talk about wasted exercise” he said this morning, and decided to swear off any kind of effort then and there.

The first Sternbergia lutea is blooming. The guy I live with had to get “replacement bulbs” because the ones he had before “met with unhappy accidents”, meaning, of course, that he jabbed them with a trowel, and that was that. He wondered why he hadn’t seen any last autumn, and of course that was the reason.

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And finally, at long last, we have crocuses. I wasn’t worrying, but the guy I live with was beginning to wonder. This is a fancy-schmancy form of Crocus kotschyanus. It has a name and number, which are of course lost. People who claim to have photographic memories should be able to remember the name and number, but he claims he never looked at the label. The label he printed. Whatever.

So I thought maybe we should look at a certain blog I know. We did, and there isn’t any number, just a name. “Reliant’. Unlike someone’s memory, I guess. (Yes, I know, “declining years”, but is that really an excuse?) Two weeks later than last year.

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This has been quite an effort, believe me. I’d like to go now, and so I will.

Until next time.

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