the miserable gardener

leafage and branchage

Hello yet again; it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here to provide you with truly memorable posts. You may remember me from such posts as “On A Rampage” and “The Dog Days”. Here I am today, trying to look agreeable while the guy I live with is muttering to himself about all the work he has to do now. Besides shut the top drawer there, I mean.

He made fun of me on our walk this morning, because Norm the coyote strolled right by and I wasn’t paying any attention at all, even when he said “Look, there’s Norm”, since I was staring at something interesting in the weeds. So now it’s my turn.

It all started with the tree-sawing business yesterday, where he got all sweaty and complained a lot. He left these branches “for tomorrow”, which is now today, and nothing has happened except the branches were photographed, which doesn’t make them go away.

Then in the middle of the night the guy I live with woke up, and Browning’s ridiculously ugly line (from The Ring and the Book) “leafage and branchage, vulgar eyes admire” popped into his head, and he doesn’t want lines from Browning floating around in his head any more than he wants to read things where apostrophes are used with plurals, or listen to people pronounce the word “agastache” as though they’d never heard the word “apostrophe” pronounced. The word “agastache” is, of course, a word in the English language, not Latin or Greek, so, no ugly Browning, please. The guy I live with feels about Browning pretty much the same way as G. M. Hopkins did, but with apostrophes.

So we now have a surfeit of branchage. The guy I live with says that the Amur maple (Acer ginnala) featured above was struck by lightning, which it probably wasn’t, but he claims that’s “more romantic than saying it just died”. Whatever. Now he has a mess to clean up, and he’ll have to get all sweaty, which of course is pathetic. He says he could just leave the branches there, as sort of a Gothic ruin, but he has visitors coming in a few weeks, and I don’t think they’ll appreciate having to climb over a Gothic ruin, no matter how evocative it may be.

The Kentucky coffee tree (Gymnocladus dioicus), on top of which the hummingbird fight took place the other day, has a whole bunch of new leafage. The guy I live with says this is going to make more branchage, and he’ll have to saw that down eventually. I keep telling him that everything has an “eventually” but he says to focus on the tree as it is now, instead of droning on about what might eventually happen, so I guess I’ll try to stop telling him what he knows is going to happen. He’ll find out, eventually.

In the picture above you can dimly see some more branchage, on the left; this from a dead New Mexican locust (Robinia neomexicana), on which both hummingbirds and wrens like to perch, probably to survey their domain.

The largest manifestation of leafage and branchage on the estate here is the honey locust; this was here when the guy I live with and my mommy bought the house.

It’s now a mess of branchage going every which way, leafage growing weirdly, dead stuff everywhere, and, to pretend to be Browning for just a second, to poke fun at the guy I live with, “poddage”. The rain of honey locust poddage has already begun, and the guy I live with dislikes having to pick them up constantly. He says picking things up makes him light-headed. So that’s it.

And at least one nest. And the pods of which there’s going to be a rain of. The “rain of the pods” sounds like one of those sword-and-sorcerer things, if you ignore the misspelling. Like, “it was back during the rain of the pods when the king-who-was-to-come discovered that if you plant trees like this, or don’t cut them down before it’s too late, you’ll have a royal mess on your hands.” Which we have now. Poddage everywhere.

The ripened pods themselves are quite tasty and my buddy Slipper showed me how to gnaw on them to get to the seeds.

Okay, that’s about it for today. I’ve said “branchage” more times than I ever wanted to. I’d rather think of Hopkins, and his “dapple-dawn-drawn falcon”, and other stuff much less icky than Browning.

Unless some branchage falls on the guy I live with while he’s cutting it down, I’ll see you next time.

on a rampage

Greetings, everyone; once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to provide you with the most entertaining and enlightening posts possible. You may remember me from such posts as “Stinker’s Revenge” and “Last Seen Wearing”, among others.

The guy I live with is on a rampage. Here I am in a characteristic pose showing my reaction to all of this. Ears way back.

First of all, the guy I live with sawed down a bunch of dead tree branches, and “got all sweaty”. Well, boo hoo, right? All sweaty. There’s a shower upstairs, in the bathroom.

Then he discovered that his oh-so-brilliant plant of protecting the baby blue grama and buffalo grass seedlings with burlap had a slight drawback. I was tempted, here, to quote Wittgenstein, “Die Gegenstände enthalten die Möglichkeit aller Sachlagen” (objects contain the possibility of all situations), but the guy I live with gets annoyed when I quote Wittgenstein, and would almost certainly point out that in the Indian Buddhist philosophy of Mādhyamaka (that is, Prāsaṅgika Mādhyamaka), objects do not contain anything, but are simply subject to change. He can be a real pain sometimes. Nevertheless, here is the result of his lack of planning:

Just a slight drawback.

Then he got a plant of Teucrium ackermannii in the mail, and said “This is a name which is familiar to me, but ….” Thus began the rampage. He looked up everything he could look up, and discovered that there is no such botanical name as T. ackermannii. It does not exist, except in the imagination of horticulture, and is probably a hybrid, and so it should be called T. ackermannii hort., meaning “of horticulture”. It isn’t from anywhere. Not native to any real place, I mean. Here it is, in two examples:

Then he did some more looking up, and discovered that some people think it’s “Teucrium cussonii”, a name which does not exist either. The name which does exist is T. cossonii, named after the botanist Ernest Cosson (1819-1889), and is endemic to the Balearic Islands, except Menorca. Here it is.

The name is fairly recent, and was proposed to replace Teucrium pulverulentum, which was apparently invalidly published. Some botanists prefer to call this T. polium subsp. cossonii. A lot of websites include the name majoricum to go along with this. This is wrong.

Teucrium majoricum is an entirely different species (or subspecies) and has nothing to do with T. cossonii, never had anything to do with it, and the only thing they have in common is that the two separate species (or subspecies) grow in the Balearics. The preferred name for majoricum (which also grows in Spain), according to Flora Europaea, is T. polium subsp. pii-fontii. There are even more names bandied about, but the guy I live with wishes people would stop using the names cossonii and majoricum to refer to the same plant. They are not the same plant. Not than anyone ever pays much attention to him. I’ve found this a practical way of making it through the day.

Oh, and there’s also a Teucrium gussonei. That’s from China.

Another teucrium which is not the same plant, and yet gets included in this mess, is Teucrium aroanium. This is from Greece, and the leaves are very distinct.

So there you are. I admit I didn’t find this all that interesting, but when the guy I live with is on a rampage like this, I’m supposed to type what he says. He also says that anything teucric seems to make people go slightly nuts, like Penstemon teucrioides, which he says also does not exist (it’s P. crandallii, and was a figment of E.L. Greene’s overactive anti-evolutionist imagination).

Well, whatever, huh. As a character in the John Hawkes novel The Blood Oranges said, “I can give you clarity, but not understanding”.

Or was it the other way around?

the miserable gardener

leafage and branchage

on a rampage

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