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 a post for no particular reason. You may remember me from such posts as “Into The Wilderness”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can probably see that it was a nice, warm, sunny day today, though in the morning there was a little wind which was kind of chilly.
No one sits in those chairs any more, except for the guy I live with, who occasionally sits in the one that doesn’t have the birdhouse. The birdhouse needs to be hung somewhere in the garden. It fell down some years ago and needs to be put back up. There’s at least another one, on the arbor which you can’t see. Wrens like to nest in the birdhouses.
The buffalo grass is still brown, but we’ve seen other lawns turning green lately.
The grass in the field is turning green, too.

The guy I live with spotted the first crocus in flower. This is Crocus reticulatus, from areas on the north side of the Black Sea.
This is a snowdrop from the same region. Galanthus plicatus.
Maybe you can see how the outer edges of the leaves are slightly folded inward. This is called explicative vernation, which gives the species its name.
There were bees all over the flowers today.

This is something different; a small spring-flowering colchicum called Colchicum munzurense.
So things besides snowdrops are starting to appear, though there’s still a lot of snow in the garden, in places anyway.

Today, the guy I live with sowed some mandrake seeds he got from J.L. Hudson. (He also got some other seeds, too; he’s been ordering from Hudson for decades.)
He kind of grumbled about the “wildly conflicting” information online about how to germinate the seeds, and so eventually he decided to sow them in pots and then he set the pots outdoors on the patio shelves.
He tried mandrakes before–his wife wanted to grow them–but the seeds didn’t germinate. The plants are poisonous so they’ll go in the shade garden, where I never go.

It is that time of year, rough for people who have lost loved ones, with spring coming, and he thought of getting the mandrake seeds because his wife wanted to have mandrakes in the garden.

I hear that about the last five years have been rough for a lot of people (though it’s been pretty good for me, since the guy I live with has been home with me a lot), with constant weirdness. I’ve experienced some of that, with not seeing owls as much as we used to, strangers digging a big hole in the Employees Only section of our garden, the sinkhole, strangers in our house when the new furnace was installed, the mysterious piles of trash north of the canal, foxes, the landmine, and now there’s something else.

Just the other day, when we went to walk along the canal road, a block from our house, I noticed a big truck blocking the road. I wanted to turn around, but the guy I live with said to keep going, and eventually we saw a guy working in the canal.
The guy I live with talked to the canal guy, introduced me as the Discoverer of the Sinkhole, and talked about that and all the other related weird stuff.
He was a very nice guy, who said he was a “ditch rider”, and gave the guy I live with his card, in case we saw anything else weird going on, canal-wise.

His job was to clear out obstacles from the canal, and all the willows on the north side of the canal were cut down. The willows had been a real mess for a year or two; some of them had fallen into the canal, and so forth.
You can also see how muddy it is. There’s a lot of mud everywhere. Especially on my paws, as the guy I live with has pointed out more than once.
I kind of like mud, though not having willows on this side of the canal feels super weird. The guy I live with said they’ll grow back. But I did have to thoroughly check all this out.

So that’s all I have for today. I guess I’ll get used to having no willows on that side of the road when I go on my walks. The weirdness is exhausting, though.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about our winter, so far. You may remember me from such posts as “The Caterpillars”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I’m way out by the back fence, if you couldn’t tell.
You can also see that most of our garden is still filled with snow.
The guy I live with says this is extremely tiresome and boring. Though he also says that having to worry about the opposite situation, “fire weather”, makes the boredom tolerable.
It seems like we can’t have a situation in between that, any more.
I think it’s boring, too, because I like to help the guy I live with when he works in the garden, which, in typical winters, could easily be in February.

I mean there is still stuff to do. The guy I live with learned today that our front garden is going to be dug up, again. There was a lot of heavy sighing, especially since this may involve thirty-year old shrubs which he can never replace.

And there are things happening inside. Just look at the Thai basil. It’s still green after almost two weeks.
The rooted basil is doing well, under lights. The lights make the color look weird.
And other things, coming up from seeds he sowed.
These are baby yuccas. (Yucca pallida.)
The guy I live with said he was going to order more seeds, “Just to have something to fiddle with”.

Maybe sometime I’ll talk more about the guy I live with’s main interest in life (besides me), music, and show his audio system.
But in the meantime, I want to talk about something else, and go back into our garden for that.

The guy I live with has this book, which he bought for his wife. He says it’s in some ways a “life-altering” book.
Some principles espoused in the book were incorporated into the way our house is laid out, like “Sleeping to the East”, among others.
The guy I live with, especially, is really into patterns, and the way things are arranged. That could be a whole post in itself.

In the book, there’s a short chapter called “Zen View”.
A Buddhist monk lived high in the mountains, in a small stone house. Far,  far in the distance was the ocean, visible and beautiful from the mountains. But it was not visible from the monk’s house itself, nor from the approach road to the house. However, in front of the house there stood a courtyard surrounded by a thick stone wall. As one came to the house, one passed through a gate into this court, and then diagonally across the court to the front door of the house. On the far side of the courtyard there was a slit in the wall, narrow and diagonal, cut through the thickness of the wall. As a person walked across the court, at one spot, where his position lined up with the slit in the wall, for an instant, he could see the ocean. …
The view of the distant sea is so restrained that it stays alive forever.

(The guy I live with said that this book is out of print, and still kind of expensive, but it’s worth acquiring if you like stuff like this.)

You may ask what this has to do with gardening. Being the Designated Narrator, I’ll tell you.
But first of all, I should say that we live where we live. If the guy I live with had wanted something different, and of course sometimes he does, he would have moved shortly after his wife died. But remember the music part, and the fact that we’re here, and not some place else.

Since this has turned out to be one of those winters where the snow lingers in the garden for what seems like forever, we have to be content with our Zen view of plants in flower in the garden, and right now that means just snowdrops.
Yes, the pots are kind of ugly, but you can’t see the pond baskets with some of the snowdrops. I hear that this year everything will be redone, and all the fancy snowdrops will be planted in pond baskets.
This is ‘Chequers’.
This is Galanthus plicatus, but there’s no label, so the guy I live with isn’t totally sure if this is a named variety or not.This is Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’. The guy I live with acquired this from Brent and Becky’s (maybe), though this is “kind of ordinary”, it’s been doing very well planted along the edge of the path.So, yes, a lot of these are later than they typically would be, and it’s supposed to snow again this coming weekend, but the guy I live with said the snowdrops give us the gardening equivalent of a “Zen view” of what is, and what could be happening here, and that’s good enough for him, considering the uncooperative weather.

And that’s all I have for today. I was left alone for a while, but the guy I live with brought me back some stuff from the store, and I do realize, even though I rarely say it, that I’m very fortunate that he spends so much time at home with me.

Until next time, then.