It’s me again. Chess the purebred border collie. You may remember me from such excellent posts as “Left Alone” and “He Fixes Something”. Apparently the guy I live with doesn’t read my posts, because I was left alone again today. The guy I live with had to go to the nursery again for what he claimed was a “horticultural emergency”. I was left alone for almost two hours. I was sad.
Here I am pretending there is such a thing as a horticultural emergency and that everything is okay now. The plants he got are in the cardboard box behind me; he has several special boxes for plants. They hold a lot of plants. Just to my left, by the way, is the slipper plant. It reminds me of my buddy Slipper but he was named for a character in The Irish R.M. and not for the plant.
Here I am in another pose, spying on the neighbors. The fence is in pretty bad shape but the guy I live with says it’s just “rustic”. That’s what he says about almost everything. It’s rustic. The Juniperus squamata in front of me is in pretty bad shape too. I bet he digs it out some time this year. He’s really mean to his plants.
Since we have an agreement that I can talk about myself so long as I show pictures of flowers, here we go. Penstemon angustifolius.
Here’s another one in the same section, Coerulei, the guy I live with’s favorite section, but since he’s entered his declining years, that’s the only thing he knows about it.
Here’s one in the guy I live with’s second favorite section, Glabri, or, as they used to call it, Habroanthus. He says this is Penstemon mensarum. Every once in a while he’s right. If he didn’t toss the labels we might be able to tell for sure.
The sphaeralceas are starting to bloom, too. I can sort of see orange. The guy I live with tentatively says this is Sphaeralcea munroana, though the floras say the leaves on that species are green. They also say covered with fuzz, which may make the leaves gray. It’s confusing, and I must say I don’t really care. It seeds all over the place and gets rust. The guy I live with says he can spray the leaves with Dr. Bronner’s soap, for the rust, and everything will be just fine.
Echium amoenum. This seeds all over the place too.
Those are the plants for today. I hope you enjoyed them. I could think of other things about me, but I have a funny thing to tell about the guy I live with. Not ha-ha funny, just, you know, kind of odd.
He has a special watering can just for rock garden plants. Like it makes a difference. No, he has to water the rock garden plants with his special Slovakian watering can. He says watering with a watering can made in Slovakia makes the plants happier. I know, what a weirdo.
I’ll say goodbye, now.
the miserable gardener 