the miserable gardener

and now…..more slides

One of the drawbacks to doing nothing day after day is that time seems to go by extremely slowly. I find this strange, because when I had a job, and went on vacation, I often did nothing, and time went by so fast that it seemed like I had had no vacation at all. There is nothing hanging over me (except the property tax bill, which hasn’t come yet), so I get to experience winter moment by moment by frozen, still, quiet moment.

I had reached a stage in which the contest between man and mouse, that is, who is the more intelligent of the two, seemed to have resolved itself in my favor. What a relief. I always thought I was smarter than a mouse. I put the Tin Cat, with the peanut butter, out in the garage, and hadn’t noticed any signs of mice in the kitchen. A little of the peanut butter was being eaten every night.

Some of the bread I buy (when I don’t bake my own) has heels too big for the toaster, and since I loathe throwing away food, putting it in the garage for the mice seemed like the logical thing to do. I set it half in the Tin Cat, so the lid wouldn’t fall on anyone during their midnight snacking. There were little nibbled areas in the bread every morning, so I knew that my plan was working; the mice were in the garage and not in the kitchen.

This morning, though, I noticed a new, ominous trend. One whole piece of bread has disappeared. Is one mouse strong enough to move a piece of bread? I don’t think so. Maybe an army of them? Or, to quote Dorothy Parker, “what fresh hell is this?”

This is how my life goes. Surrounded by snow that won’t go away, surrounded by hungry rodents. And yet, on our walk yesterday, instead of feeling trapped in an endless winter, I felt a twinge of spring. Maybe it’s right around the corner ….

Everyone needs a Label Garden. The French scare cat (real thing, not the crummy imitation) is scaring away anything that might want to eat the labels.
Mass of dead-looking stuff on the left is Verbascum undulosum in its winter wear.

Acantholimons starting to consume large amounts of space in the new rock garden. Snowing on them in this picture. They died a couple of years later, which was weird because they usually live forever, or nearly so.

Douglasia nivalis in a trough …in January.

Talk about something taking forever, this is Pediocactus simpsonii, about ten years old from seed.

Iris pumila. This is either the cultivar ‘Piroschka’ or a form from the Kuban in Russia. Maybe it’s both.

A Primula allionii hybrid. These are the only primulas that like me.

When I looked at this as a slide, I couldn’t make it out at all. It’s a leaf of Eryngium bourgatii.

And now for some pulsatillas. Not too many things more beautiful than these, even though they do seed all over the place here. There is one that I truly covet, the beautiful form known as ‘Budapest Blue’. This is sort of close.

Pulsatilla halleri

Some species have more tubular, less open flowers. I once grew, from seed, two species of pulsatilla, one from Sublin’s Lake, one from Death Lake, in Central Asia. They sounded totally cool, but the seedlings died. They could have turned out like the one below, though, which is less exciting than some others.

Pulsatilla sp. with Erodium sibthorpianum

One of the European species is said to be extremely difficult to grow. I tried Pulsatilla alpina subsp. apiifolia from seed (the seed is said to be very short lived), gave up, and figured that was the end. I even removed the “tails” from the seed which some people say contains a germination inhibitor.

Then one day this carrot-looking thing appeared in the garden. It grew and grew, and eventually did this.

Pulsatilla alpina subsp. apiifolia in a sea of Aubrieta anamasica.

Last, and definitely not least, the native Pulsatilla patens, called “crocus” in some parts of the west. I had this plant in the garden once, and killed it trying to transplant it. Digging them up is certain death for the plant.

These pictures were taken at Plainview, Colorado, in March. I had an ear infection and the wind was blowing, so I just stood around while Cindy took these pictures of plants growing under recently-burned ponderosas. I am very good at just standing around. Charred twigs and juvenile cones are visible in the photographs.

Pulsatilla patens

what, more slides?

More slides. All the photographs were taken using Kodachrome 64, which Cindy preferred because it didn’t create that super-saturated color that was, and maybe still is, so popular. She didn’t approve of the effect. The only reason I know what kind of film was used is that I was asked to pick some up after work on several occasions, because of film emergencies.

There are still undeveloped rolls of film lying around here, with who knows what on them; the cameras may still have film, and there are even some rolls of black-and-white slide film, because I had this idea that doing a slide show in black-and-white might be different, if not edifying. (I can picture the audience slowly sneaking away.) I might have the film developed, and then again, I might not. It takes me forever, relatively speaking, to get around to do things that aren’t of critical importance. Which, to me, means almost everything.

Permit me to illustrate this. Every time I go out, like to the store, I’m drawn into these conversations that revolve around “the game”. As in “Did you catch the game last night?” Or “I’ll be home just in time for the game”. The looks I get when I indicate that my interest in such things is less than zero make me think I really am a stranger in a strange land. I might counter with “I’ll be home just in time to see Viburnum farreri open its first flowers” just to see the reaction. Why should I be interested in something just because everyone else is?

Better yet, I could start a conversation with something like “You know that scene in Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin, where she invokes proença ….” and then run. I learned a long, long time ago that the things I find fascinating almost never interest anyone else; Cindy was an exception which is one reason we got along so well.

These are mostly slides of plants in the rock garden or in the troughs. That was the main purpose of taking pictures in those days (1990s); I whined endlessly about not having enough slides with which to do slide shows, and my photographer grudgingly took pictures of plants she didn’t think were all that exciting. Sometimes she took to a plant, and when I let it die, I never heard the end of it.

So, I do understand that these plants might not thrill everyone. I did take pains not to include pictures of plants with only one flower. (The titanopsis, with its reptilian leaves, is another story altogether.) My photographer found requests like this to be merely annoying. “It only has one flower. This is stupid.” I tried to explain that there might be four people on the planet who liked to see plants in flower, even if there was only one flower, and that sometimes all you get is one flower, and just maybe those people would be attending one of my slide shows, and come up to me afterwards and say, “Ah, I see you got this to flower”, thereby making the whole thing worthwhile.

Some of the plants pictured do have a certain snob appeal, what might be called the “neener factor”, but I’m far too dignified a person to indulge in such things.