Greetings and salutations everyone; one again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, who’s been busy trying to figure out which way is up, as I’ll explain more below. You may remember me from such posts as “Left Alone” and “Another Lonely Day”, among other posts, most of which are not quite as sad as those. He left me alone again today, but not for long, and he brought back food for me. What a hunter, huh? Here I am in a characteristic pose. Characteristically out of focus, too.
The guy I live with says my mouth is open a lot. (“Whether his mouth be open or shut.”) I’ve said that before, and my reply is still the same. Look who’s talking. Anyway, it was kind of hot today. 87 degrees F (30.5C) and 13 percent humidity. (“Almost up to the limit”, he said, though it felt really dry.)
When he came back from hunting, he said we weren’t going to do anything. Like we do anything anyway. That suits me just fine.
He was just sitting here doing nothing, when the mail came, and there was a box.
It had a happy elephant on it.
It was a box full of bulbs from Janis Ruksans in Latvia, and the guy I live with got pretty excited, like a happy elephant. He likes bulbs a lot. They like him too, which is even better.
Well, the guy I live with says it’s sometimes hard to tell which end is up with corydalis. Some of the tubers look like little potatoes or Jerusalem artichokes, which you know really aren’t from Jerusalem, but from the Italian girasole, meaning turn toward the sun, a sunflower. (Though in Italy I guess the Jerusalem artichoke is called topinambur.) I certainly wouldn’t face away from the sun if I were a plant. But the guy I live with says some do. Hymenoxys grandiflora, for instance, always faces east. Some botanists call this Rydbergia but it still faces the same way.
Where was I? Oh, the corydalis. The guy I live with says, when in doubt, plant them on an angle, and the plants will figure it out. Sometimes, anyway. They’re going in this garden, which looks fairly empty, but it really isn’t.
The chicken wire is to keep new plants from being horribly eaten by rabbits. The French scare cat is to scare away anything that needs to be scared. They scared the poop out of the neighbor dog but he’s not a purebred border collie, just a dingbat. I don’t have papers but I’m still a purebred. My parents herded sheep. I sleep on very soft sheets from Pottery Barn, but the guy I live with says they aren’t the most expensive ones, so, really, I’m roughing it.
And next spring, assuming the guy I live with planted the tubers the right way, my garden will be filled with corydalis in April, even if it’s snowing. We’ll both be happy elephants, then. (I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds good.)
I better go now.
the miserable gardener 