the miserable gardener

this and that

Greetings once again everyone; yes, it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to entertain and inform you, while the guy I live with is “lost in thought”. You may remember me from such delightful and wonderful posts as “The Abandoned House” and “A Close Call” among others. Here I am in a characteristic pose, after it stopped thundering. Characteristically out of focus, again, too.

That’s the drawing my mommy did of my uncle Pooka with the radar ears on the wall behind me. I never knew him. He was my mommy’s special baby until I showed up. I think you can see why.

“I’m tired”, the guy I live with said today, “of ‘subtropical moisture'”. I think he’s not really against anything subtropical per se, just the subtropical humidity and endless darkness. I don’t care for all the thunder, and am ready for snow. Of course it can still thunder when it’s snowing, which is really stupid, but a fact of life. I would remind the guy I live with that four inches of snow fell on September 3, 1961, which means that it could snow next week, but he’s still tired of “subtropical moisture” and the attendant darkness and probably can’t adjust to being tired of snow yet. It usually only takes one snowfall for him to be tired of it, whereas I can’t get enough of it.

So, he said this is “planting time”. Time, in other words, for the little seedlings to go out into the garden (“to their deaths”, my mommy would say), because it’s either now, or have to spend the whole winter outside in a pot, and risk either being eaten or frozen. That doesn’t sound like much fun at all.

This is Phlox griseola, ready to go out into the garden.

It’s going into this barren looking place.

Back in the old days, the guy I live with would separate the three seedlings and plant each one with a “widger”

but this time he just planted the whole pot, as it was. The reason he did this is because he said when he uses the widger he has to dig really deep holes for the long, long roots and as he’s planting he gets this idea that the little seedlings should be spread out some, so they don’t grow into each other, and when he does that, all of the seedlings die because he forgets to water them. After all that work.

In case you’re wondering, we wouldn’t be surprised if the garden received an inch or less of rain and snow from now until the end of the year, but it would be nice if it rained a little more. Minus the thunder.

Okay, well, I did title the post “this and that”, though I wondered why no one says “that and this”, and the guy I live with said that “this” usually refers to the nearest thing, like an object, under consideration, and that “that” is something different, even distant, which is also under consideration. I didn’t get it at first. This right here, and that over there. But it gives me an excuse to change subjects really quickly.

Cyclamen hederifolium is blooming in the shade garden. This, the guy I live with says, is a sign that autumn is very close. It’s also a sign of “not paying much attention to focusing”, but let’s pretend it is focused. You can see the flowers in the upper right amongst the hellebore leaves and stuff, but what he wanted a picture of was the flower stalks which are right smack in the middle of the picture. He thinks this is exciting.

Now over to what used to be called “the enclosure”, but which the guy I live with now calls “Cindy’s garden”, because my mommy made it so she could sit out there and read, in a little private space. Of course I and my buddy Slipper were allowed in there. Well, after she died, the guy I live felt it needed more plants, and needed to look happier, and so he planted a bunch of other things in this little garden, including three plants of the rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’. I don’t go in there very much any more.

Thanks to the “subtropical moisture”, the little garden is filled with the sweet scent of these roses, so the humidity does have some good points.

So then–to really impress you with his ability to focus–he was just standing outside this garden (it’s over on the right) and a hummingbird came up and tried to get him to leave, the way they do. That’s a hummingbird looking straight at him.

The hummingbird was probably interested in stuff like this.

I guess that’s a Salvia darcyi that decided to show up in the middle of things. The guy I live with wasted an awful lot of time today trying to figure out why people think that Salvia oresbia is a synonym and why it says that all the time. He wanted me to post the results of his research, but really, just because he was bored out of his mind today there’s no reason for him to share this boredom with other people.

Whatever, huh. Here’s another picture of me, wondering if the thunder has stopped, to make things more interesting. Again totally out of focus, but the guy I live with was lying on the floor pointing the camera out the window, which isn’t the sort of thing a normal person would do.

I’ll leave you with this. Until next time.

a man, a plan, a gazoon

Hello everyone; yes, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to provide you with the most entertaining and informative posts possible, while the guy I live with stares at the floor, “lost in thought”. You may remember me from such delightful posts as “Windy and Warm” and “A Partly Sad Story”, among other excellent contributions to the blogosphere.

Here I am after getting all soaking from the hose, on this very hot day.

It was a very weird day, too. Full of silliness, which of course I’ll relate to you. The guy I live with has a new gardening book.

Alternatives to a lawn. It says about the picture on the cover, “Dans notre jardin expérimental, un assortment de plantes couvre-sol à feuillage gris ou argenté compose une alternative au gazon originale, demandant peu d’entretien et resistant très bien à la sécheresse.” (The guy I live with said to quote the original, so as to seem more serious. “In our experimental garden, an assortment of ground cover plants with gray or silver foliage makes an original alternative to the lawn, requiring little maintenance and highly resistant to drought.” He would just say he’s “being all alternative and stuff”.)

So…..he says this book is really brilliant, and now he desperately wants a lawn alternative. Right now he just has an alternative lawn filled with other plants, which, for want of a better word, he’s decided to call a gazoon.

You may wonder about this. My mommy would have said “I’m not going to call it a gazoon”, very matter-of-factly, and he would of course have taken that as a signal to make a reference to the gazoon every five minutes, until she got really mad at him, at which point he would have started laughing, and she would mutter something about having married a nut. He would then say that if someone rang him up on the phone, she could say “Oh, he’s out on the gazoon, tending to things, you know.”

He found this word right after gazon in the Oxford English Dictionary (the one you need a magnifying glass for), and it says “an adapted form of the preceding, with mistaken sense.” Since gazon could be something like a bulwark covered with grass, it’s easy–maybe–to see how James Hogg mistook the word’s meaning in his epic poem The Queen’s Wake, written in 1813. A brief excerpt will give a sense of its contents.

Dumlanrig’s eye with ardour shone;
“Follow!” he cried, and spurred him on.
A close gazoon the horsemen made,
Douglas and Morison the head,
And through the ranks impetuous bore,
By dint of lance and broad claymore,
Mid shouts, and groans of parting life,
For hard and doubtful was the strife.
Behind a knight, firm belted on,
They found the fair May Morison.
But why, through all Dumlanrig’s train,
Search her bright eyes, and search in vain?
A stranger mounts her on his steed;
Brave Morison, where art thou fled?

Whew. The guy I live with certainly knows how to waste time on a hot summer day, looking up stuff like this. Here is the gazoon in the front yard. The bare areas are “standing places” for people to view the surrounding garden. The actual gazoon is comprised of some blue grama, Ratibida columnaris, and a young Mexican blue oak, Quercus oblongifolia, in a tomato cage.

In the back yard, blue grama, buffalo grass, winter fat, etc.

Of course, the guy I live with has to take my needs into consideration, if you know what I mean. So he’s working on an actual lawn in the way back, to replace the green lawn which he decided it was hypocritical to have if he started making fun of peoples’ addiction to irrigation here, which he probably won’t do, but might, but only if he got rid of the green lawn. Half-drenched in sunlight this morning.

And later in the day. This is a new lawn of buffalo grass and blue grama, with “a path” (that is, a bunch of dead grass we walk back and forth on) in between them. (The dark green in back is what’s left of the original lawn.) He says he’s going to make a real path with wood mulch, but I’m afraid he’ll want to make a gazoon of this, instead of an actual lawn; something stuffed with flowers and things.

Well, I probably don’t have to worry all that much. The guy I live with does have a lawnmower, which he likes a lot, and he enjoys mowing the lawn as much as anyone else. I’ll leave you with a picture of it, and hope we’ll never have to say the word gazoon again.

the miserable gardener

this and that

a man, a plan, a gazoon

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