the miserable gardener

“…Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!”

Uh huh. Coleridge didn’t have to endure what I do; in fact, the previous min-max thermometer I owned was made in England, and one night it got so cold the thermometer just gave up.

This is the face of winter right now. The thermometer says about 18, which is no dream of spring.

A few scanned slides of plants in the rock gardens, to cheer me up. I suppose these were taken back in the last century.

Acantholimon araxanum; fruit of Physaria chambersii behind it

Acantholimon kotschyi

Androsace vandellii

Arabis aubretioides

Carlina acaulis ….Cindy accidentally weeded this out one year

Edraianthus pumilio ….messily devoured by rodents a few years ago

Edraianthus serbicus

Then some cactus pictures, to remind myself that the cactus sale at DBG is only eleven weeks away. Time, even frozen time, passes quickly. Cactus sale …..cactus sale ……are my hands trembling? Maybe it’s just the cold.

In De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, we learn that Coleridge tried to cure himself of his opium addiction by paying people to stand guard in front of the shops, to keep him from buying opium, and then he would bribe them to let him in. I employ a more subtle approach.

“Excuse me, but I do believe that plant was grown especially for me. Do you mind?”

“I looked at these plants earlier, and they all have a disease that’s very difficult to cure. If you would go over to that area in the corner, you might find something you like.”

“These aren’t hardy here; they brought the wrong plants by mistake. If you would go over to that area in the corner …etc.”

“There’s a game on in the other room.”

I did, as I think I mentioned, injure my back trying to carry all the plants at the DBG Mother’s Day sale, and the lesson I learned here is that I should plan to nurse my injured back again.

This last one is what Anderson, in The Cactus Family, calls Echinocereus mojavensis. The curved spines being diagnostic. Cindy wanted to draw this, so I dug up the whole plant and potted it, and it spent about a year in the house, sitting for its portrait. Then I replanted it in the garden. Maybe I should dig up all the plants and put them inside for the winter.

approaching zero

The min-max thermometer on the back patio says it got to half a degree below zero last night, and that it was four above when I started the coffee machine. (That’s usually about as cold as it gets here.) When we got back from our walk, it was almost eight. The sun warmed things up a bit on the walk, so it felt like ten, or even twelve.

The forecast says it will be in the 50s this week, which makes me wonder why it couldn’t just be in the 50s now. Why do we have to share things with the arctic? Suppose I didn’t feel like sharing? Why am I even here, living in such a frigid, barren, windswept place? The coldest place in North America, right now, is my garage.

There’s a package of flour tortillas in the freezer that’s been there for a while. The tortillas are covered in ice, and shatter when I touch them. What if I became like one of those tortillas, on our walk, and the dog just went home, waiting on the front step, while I just fell apart, piece by piece, out in the field, frozen and alone, until the coyotes came?

So I thought I would share more of Cindy’s digital photographs, if I fail to return from our walk this afternoon, as the sun starts to set and the temperature plummets to some black, frozen, horrible degree that only a border collie would enjoy. (It’s a balmy 20 degrees right now.) Otherwise the disks that hold the pictures would probably just be thrown away, like almost everything else. I bet that when you’re dragged away by coyotes, digital photographs contained on a disk that looks like any other disk just don’t have the same meaning that they did before.