the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on the new from around here. You may remember me from such posts as “The Terrors Of Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’ll talk about the wheelbarrow in a bit.

A couple of interesting things happened while we were away. There’s another sinkhole, though not as big as the one last summer (the guy I live with called the appropriate people), and the water in the canal was shut off after all the rain we got.
And then, I got to see the water start flowing again. That was very interesting indeed.
As I said in an earlier post, the guy I live with decided not to remove all the lilacs because it would be way too much work and there would nothing to replace them with, and, anyway, the lilacs are having a good year.
This is ‘Pocahontas’.
This is ‘Miss Ellen Willmott’.
This is ‘Assessipi’.
And, finally, ‘Victor Lemoine’, a heavily-scented double.
So those are the lilacs, not counting ‘Annabel’ which I already showed pictures of, and not counting the common purple one, of which we have several. The guy I live with bought those for $6.25 each about thirty years ago.
One of our neighbors came over and the guy I live with cut a bunch of lilac flowers for his wife.

The main thing going on her is the wind. I am, too. Super windy, chilly, with no rain. The guy I live with said that in some parts of Europe there are winds that can drive people nuts, and now we understand that.
We were awakened at 3:16 (precisely) two mornings ago by the wind. Very annoying.
One of the fake hornet’s nests blew away but the guy I live with retrieved it. They make a very strange sound rocking back and forth in the wind.

Speaking of annoying things, remember how I said the guy I live with was digging out this aster-thing which was infuriating him? It’s back.
He said the roots must go down to the center of the earth.
I blush to think of the language I’ve been hearing, when it comes to digging out this plant. It’s coming up everywhere.
There are already issues with smooth brome (the grass that’s in the field behind our house) and bindweed, so this aster thing is just too much.

Since I’m on the subject of things being dug out, the reason that the wheelbarrow is out in the garden is because the guy I live with is digging out the path where the wheelbarrow is.
He moved it out of the way so I wouldn’t run into it at night.
All kinds of things have seeded into that path, where the bag and kneeling pad are, and he got tired of looking at it. The path will be gravel, like most of the other paths here.
The yellow leaves on the yucca need to be removed, too, because he said they’re unsightly.
(The white in the background is an arabis, if you wanted to know.)

Except for the wind, though, all of this is good, as far as I’m concerned, because I can sit out in the garden and watch him work, which is one of my favorite things to do.
He can’t work as much as he used to be able to, but it’s surprising how much he can get accomplished. He does miss his helper, his wife, at this time of year, especially. She loved to weed, but may not have enjoyed pulling out that aster thing.

So that’s our news.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me checking out the smooth brome growing on the side of the canal road. The grass really is everywhere around here. You can see that the other side of the road was sprayed, and I’m supposed to stay away from that side. I mostly do.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the somewhat damp purebred border collie, here today to tell you about the news of the last twenty-four hours. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Spring Stuff”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, waiting for a biscuit.
You may be able to tell what happened here this morning.
It isn’t supposed to freeze tonight, so this is no big deal, according to the guy I live with.

Before I get to the news, which the snow is part of, I should show some of the plants that were in flower yesterday. They’re still in flower, but covered with snow now.
This is the lilac, ‘Annabel’. It’s the first lilac to flower here, and is rarely nipped by frost, unlike the common purple types.
The guy I live with has decided not to remove all the lilacs; he said it would be too much work.
This is Fritillaria pallidiflora:
This is Fritillaria oliveri. You can see progeny at the base of the plant behind it.
Cyclamen pseudibericum flowers later than the other cyclamen here.

Okay, so now I have a little story to tell. This involves me, so there will be added interest.
Way back when, the guy I live with and his wife used to have this agreement, that if they saw something special that one of them wanted, they should buy it. Like a book or a CD or a Christmas ornament. Not to mention purebred border collie puppies.

After his wife died, he made a last visit to Jerry Morris’s nursery. He bought some conifers, and noticed a little row of maybe four dwarf intermountain bristlecone pines, Pinus longaeva.
These are fairly similar to the bristlecone that’s from the mountains here, Pinus aristata, but don’t have the “leaky needles” as Jerry described them. (I’ve showed a picture of the dwarf Colorado bristlecone that he got from Jerry.) The needles do have some resin “leaking” from them, but not as much as the bristlecone of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona; both species grow in subalpine and alpine regions.

For some reason, the guy I live with didn’t get any of these little pines, grafted from witches’ brooms.
He has regretted this ever since then.

Yesterday there was a big plant sale at the county fairgrounds. The guy I live with told me he wouldn’t stay very long, and would try not to buy very many plants.
The forecast, believe it or not, called for rain. The sale took place in the evening.
The guy I live with rarely leaves me alone in the evening, and so he gave me some Rescue Remedy on a biscuit, just in case.

He wasn’t at the plant sale for very long. After the landmine business, he had signed up for alerts from the county, and his phone went off as he was driving home. There was lots of thunder and lightning.
When he stopped at a red light, he looked at his phone, and there was a severe thunderstorm warning, right where he was sitting in his car.

It started to hail on our new car. Fortunately the hail was only pea-sized, and he was less than twenty blocks from home.
When he got home, he saw that it had hailed here, and apologized profusely for abandoning me. I was okay, but decided to play it pretty pathetically.

Eventually he brought out the plants he bought; conifers propagated by Laporte Avenue Nursery. They propagate several of Jerry’s conifers, mostly named varieties, but at least one that isn’t named.
There’s a Pinus flexilis ‘Saunny’, named after Jerry Morris’s wife, and two dwarf Pinus longaeva. The guy I live with said he thought Jerry never gave these a name. Even if these aren’t the same as the ones he saw at the nursery, all those years ago, they’re good enough.
I could tell he was very happy with these pines. He said he was going to “coddle the daylights out of them”.

The pines can live happily in pots; their roots can tolerate a great deal of cold. (The roots of Pinus flexilis, for instance, are hardy down to -79F, -61.6C, so living in pots here isn’t an issue at all. The guy I live with said he can’t imagine cold like that.)

And that’s our little story.

This morning, the guy I live with was a bit concerned that I might not want to go on my morning walk, considering the possibility of thunder, but by the time we were ready for our walk, it was snowing. It can still thunder when it snows, but it didn’t, this time.
(The snow has mostly melted now, and it’s just raining.)

Water in the creek was flowing really fast. Maybe all the sand will have been washed down the creek after all of this.
I’ll let you go now, with some pictures of the creek, and best of all, pictures of me.

Until next time, then.