the miserable gardener

three percent humidity

Greetings everyone, once again it is I, Chess the purebred border collie, here to bring you the most enjoyable posts possible. You may remember me from such posts as “Making a List” and “Trials and Tribulations”. Those were truly outstanding posts, if I do say so myself. And of course I do.

Here I am looking charming and agreeable in what the guy I live with thinks is a lawn. I sometimes wonder about him.

And here I am looking the other way. You can see there is some grass here; buffalo grass, which according to the guy I live with makes it a lawn.

Well, so much for lawn talk. Yesterday, as the title of my post suggests, the humidity got down to three percent at about two in the afternoon. That’s drier than even Death Valley was yesterday. Three percent humidity is what you might call dry. It was windy, too. I didn’t like it very much but the guy I live with, who’s pretty nice to me, hosed me off twice yesterday.

I wondered what would happen when the humidity got to zero. Or lower. Could you, like, owe humidity? If you turned on the hose, would the water just disappear? These are the sort of things I think about. I like the hose a lot.

Today there was smoke from the fire about sixty miles to the south of here, and the humidity soared to a muggy nine percent, and I was still hot. The guy I live with wanted to call me a hot dog but I didn’t think that was wildly funny. I like hot dogs. When my buddy Slipper was sick, the guy I live with made a kind of paté out of cooked hot dogs, hardboiled eggs, and cheese that was really good. I got to eat a lot of it even though I wasn’t supposed to. I also liked the rice swimming in chicken fat and our regular food drizzled with sardine juice. The guy I live with is quite a chef.

Sorry, I started out okay and then got distracted by my favorite subject. You know, food. The guy I live with was supposed to open the present he got for me the other day but he got distracted, as usual. I showed a picture of what he did the other day.

And today, he did this. Those ropy things in the upper right are branches of Daphne alpina. He says to say “from Archibald seed”, which apparently adds class. We always seem to be needing to “add some class”. I’ll have to think about that one for a while, because he has me, a purebred border collie. The daphne was being pushed into one of the paths by the mugo pine which was growing too big for its britches. I didn’t know plants had britches but the guy I live with says they do. He says it’s mystical. That’s his explanation for a lot of things.

So, he has room for more plants. Amazing how that works.

Here are a couple of cactus flowers. (Remember I have to show flowers if I get to use the computer.) He could have taken this from the other side of the plant but he says that was too much trouble. So there’s a branch in the way. (It’s Atriplex gairdneri.)

Here’s one of those fancy echinocereus hybrids. The flower really is this color, he says, with tints of purple inside.

What else? Oh, in the rolling-your-eyes department, which the guy I live with does almost every time someone talks about drought and watering restrictions, you’re allowed to water container plants. This is his idea of what container plants in Colorado should be.

True, the dasylirion (Dasylirion acrotriche) isn’t quite centered in the pot, which kind of detracts from the sense of pure horticultural enlightenment here, but no one is perfect. In fact, these pots are on the driveway. That seems a little weird to me, but the guy I live with says it’s progressive.

Whatever he says, huh. I’ll say goodbye, for now.

it’s raining flowers

Hello there, it’s me again, Chess the purebred border collie. You may remember me from such fascinating and wonderful posts as “Left Alone” (either one) and “He Fixes Something”. Posts done by border collies set the standard for excellence simply because we are, of course, excellent. And modest.

It’s raining flowers today.

It’s also really hot. Or it was, until the skies got dark and there was scary thunder, but otherwise, it’s hot. This isn’t me, by the way.

As I said before, it’s raining flowers. They’re all over the place; the birdbath is filled with them, I track them into the house, and so does the guy I live with.

These are the flowers, or petals, or some part of the flower of Fontanesia fortunei, or, as botanists want to call it now, Fontanesia philliraeoides subsp. fortunei. It’s supposedly called the “desert bamboo” though it doesn’t grow in deserts and isn’t a bamboo. It’s a member of the olive family. Like privet. And, of course, olives.

The guy I live with bought this desert bamboo thing and figured it would get about six feet tall. Or it would die. It didn’t get anywhere near six feet tall, even though it only got watered when it was little. It lives next to the patio and probably gets water from under there, like plants do. This is it at about six feet off the ground. From there, it goes up. And the flowers come down.

Some trees haven’t fared so well this year. This is the maple that the guy I live with plans to cut down. Eventually. He started cutting it down, discovered it was hard work, and took a nap instead. That’s why the maple is still here.

And the Kentucky coffee tree. It looks like it’s dead, but maybe it’s not. On the tenth of June, it still hasn’t leafed out completely. This picture is looking up into the sky. My grandpa Flurry would run outside and look up into the sky when he heard the word “helicopter”. He was smart. I look up into the sky sometimes, too, when I have to check the weather. I prefer sun, and cold weather. The guy I live with prefers sun, and really hot weather, but things work out for us anyway.

Oh, the tree. Here it is.

Other things are doing okay. This is Buddleia alternifolia ‘Argentea’. It was here when I showed up. It’s almost a tree. The guy I live with says some people spell the generic name as buddleja. This is really important.

The New Mexican locust, Robinia neomexicana, is doing really well too. It’s kind of out of control, actually. The guy I live with was too chicken to go in the back to take pictures with the sun behind him. Before he said I could do posts, so long as I didn’t use his credit card, he posted about this very scary plant, here, where you can see what might grab you if you weren’t paying attention. My mommy wanted to paint a picture of the flowers, but she never did.

So that’s it for the plant talk today. As I say, it was really hot today and the guy I live with hosed me off twice, so I could be cooler. He also went to the store and promised to bring me back something, which he claims he did. I think I know what’s inside, and if I’m right, then at least some of it really is for me. I don’t know how to open it, though.

the miserable gardener

three percent humidity

it’s raining flowers

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