Hello once again, everyone; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, who says he “ate something he shouldn’t’ve” and is under the weather, and so I, who always eat the right things, am here to provide you with delightful and entertaining posts. You may remember me from such posts as “A Beautiful Day” and “On A Rampage”, among others.
Here I am looking slightly bemused. My ears are way back because I’m being forced to pose for my picture. A picture which makes my legs look silly, if you ask me.
Well, the first thing that happened, and it really happened several days ago but the effect is only now beginning to be felt, is that the guy I live with suddenly decided that the garden needed fifty lavenders. That’s right, fifty lavenders. Most people would decide that a couple of lavenders would do, but no, he had to have fifty lavenders. He just got this book on Mediterranean gardening and so for some reason he thinks that if he plants lavenders, the garden will look more Mediterranean. I can’t follow that reasoning. It might not even be reasoning.
His real excuse was that he didn’t have these particular varieties. That’s some excuse. A few have already been planted, in the North Border, which as you may recall he said was “half disaster and half catastrophe” a while back. I would say now, and half full of lavenders. Half a total mess, too. This was the first part of the yard made into a garden, and it’s been going downhill for about twenty-five years.
You can see a few here, especially near the Havahart trap which is just there for looks.
The guy I live with says for me to lighten up because most of them will probably die anyway. That’s some optimism we have there.
There are more lavenders coming in the mail, as well as some other, non-lavender plants, and I wondered where they were going to go, until, over coffee one morning, the guy I live with said, “I do have a horror of the straight line”, which made no sense to me at the time.
More lavenders are supposed to go here. Look at all that empty space on the right, he says. True, this part was demolished when the fence was put in, but “all that empty space” I don’t know about.
Oh, the straight line. There it is right here. See, the guy I live with thinks he has an extra foot or so of potential garden if he pulls out that piece of wood which has been making that straight line for many, many years. “Plenty of room for lavenders there”, he says.
True, the path has always only needed to be wide enough for a border collie, and I almost never use this path any more, except to help the guy I live with pull the hose along, because I have this one, which we’ve shown pictures of before, but now it’s got the wood mulch he promised it would have. I might point out to him that this path is sort of in a straight line, but it would probably do no good at all.
I also tried to mention that Einstein said that space was curved, and if that’s so, then isn’t every straight line ultimately curved, even if imperceptibly? The guy I live with says Einstein wasn’t a gardener. Or if he was, his garden space would have been curved.
Here are the other paths which he shows pictures of all the time. The guy I live with, not Einstein, I mean. They are both slightly curved. The thing in the middle, which the guy I live with also shows pictures of all the time, is what he calls “the lawn”. Both of the paths leading back to the patio are really paths leading from the patio out to the “way back” which I made when my buddy Slipper was here. Slipper used the path along the North Border because he liked to run in straight lines. He was a border collie, just like me, after all. So I don’t know why the guy I live with says that about straight lines. I think he just wants extra room for more lavenders.
My mommy, who did most of the actual design here (instead of just digging and then planting and saying “Look, a design”), would have none of this no straight lines business. Here are the steps she built up to the patio. They’re as level as anything can be.
The part of the patio which she finished is also straight, and as level as can be.
The extra catmint, the trough covered with chicken wire, and the crooked bowl filled with cactus, are artistic touches the guy I live with added later.
The “enclosure” (which is no longer enclosed because the guy I live with ripped out the big lilac which was helping to enclose), has a fancy lintel or something right by the entrance. It’s straight. The low level of maintenance here is the fault of the guy I live with.
So that’s what’s going on. I thought this wasn’t all that interesting, but later in the evening, when the guy I live with was looking for the end of the hose (he says “Follow the hose and you’ll find the end”, which I guess he thinks is really “deep”, since he came of age in the Sixties), and the big scary owl was in the way back doing owl things. It flew off, across the green belt. Same tree as before.
Anyway, now you know what’s been going on. Every day has its excitement, as you can see.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 