the miserable gardener

Believe it or not, it’s me again, Chess the border collie. You may remember me from all the excellent posts I have provided over the last few months. Two outstanding ones are “Left Alone” and “Mister Always Right”, though I really do have a difficult time saying which post is more excellent than another.

Here I am in anything but a characteristic pose. My head is way too large and completely out of focus, and I look like a two-toned sphinx. Well, three if you include my tongue. Why the guy I live with has such a hard time focusing, I don’t know. I think my hind feet are in focus, at least.

The guy I live with complains a lot. He doesn’t like stinky stuff. I’m a dog, and so, not to be too Cartesian or anything, I bark, therefore I like stinky things. (The guy I live with says Descartes was wrong about everything.)

The stinky stuff that the guy I live with doesn’t like are chemical smells. Laundry products, body spray, weedkiller, you name it. Other things don’t bother him much. He likes Stilton, and so do I, but he never shares much of it with me, which I think isn’t very nice.

My grandpa Flurry once rooted through the grocery bags and nabbed a wedge of Stilton which he took out into the back yard and the guy I live with had to pry his jaws open, because my grandpa Flurry liked Stilton too. The cheese had to be thrown away because it was covered with dog spit and there were deep tooth marks in it, which made the guy I live with pretty mad, at least for a few minutes.

My uncle Flurry also grabbed a whole loaf of cinnamon bread that the guy I live with had baked, and my mommy had a tug-of-war (or maybe I should say tug-of-loaf) which she finally won, but the bread was ruined for the same reason the cheese was.

And one time my buddy Slipper stole a wedge of Stilton from a grocery bag but he was too mellow to chomp into it and growl, like my grandpa Flurry would have, and so the Stilton was rescued, but I was really little at the time and I thought that’s what border collies were supposed to do. I still look through the grocery bags for stuff.

You can see how my mind wanders. Back to the chemical smells. The neighborhood stinks of this stuff almost all the time. But in the last few days, the Russian hawthorn (Crataegus ambigua) has been blooming

even though in real life it’s in focus, and it stinks to high heaven. It out-stinks everything else. You know how you’re just sitting around doing not much of anything, but in the back of your mind you have this little thought, sometimes, well, the guy I live with keeps having this little thought that someone has placed a portable toilet in the back yard, and it’s been sitting there for a few days….but it turns out to be the hawthorn.

The guy I live with says it’s because the flowers have a higher concentration of indole than some other flowers, and the higher the concentration, the stinkier. If you smell the flowers at just the right distance, they smell kind of like aniseed, to which, being a dog, I am very attracted. The haws taste really good and both I and my buddy Slipper used to graze on the fallen ones. But mostly, the thing just stinks. I like it.

The guy I live with says this is some sort of floral revenge. He is disappointed that the flower buds of Cotoneaster microphyllus were frozen, because when that blooms, it smells like rancid Russian hawthorn. This will have to do.

That’s all for today. We have the smelliest back yard around, and that’s pretty good.