the miserable gardener

My mind has been fairly blank for a few days. It’s not that I have entered what is called, in Vajrayana Buddhism, the “world beyond thought”, I’ve been doing fun things like recaulking the bathtub and cleaning out the gutters.

I also managed to outsmart a mouse for the second time in a month (probably the same mouse, too). If it is the same mouse, and it sneaks into the house a third time, I’ll outsmart it again. The mouse has no idea who it’s messing with. I can spend the coming winter outsmarting this mouse over and over again. We’ll see which is the more intelligent species.

So, like a lot of people who have nothing interesting to say, it’s time for me to start talking.

I noticed the leaves of Chrysanthemum ‘Rhumba’ turning; I don’t think of chrysanthemums when I think of autumn leaf color, but here they are.

And ‘Emperor of China’ opens pink but turns much paler, in the Colorado sun anyway. Graham Stuart Thomas wrote, in The Garden Through the Year, that it was possible to pick “armfuls” of flowers to bring indoors, but I feel lucky if I get a few flowers on stems lying sideways, flattened by early snow. My wife used to cut flowers for the house, which annoyed me to no end, at first, until I realized that it made her happy, so then I let her cut anything she wanted. I leave flowers outside where they belong.

Finally, the foliage of the rose ‘Banshee’. I mentioned earlier that I’d promised this plant to a neighbor, since it’s going to get much too large for the spot I put it in (my philosophy here being that the closer together you plant things, the warmer they’ll be in the winter), but now I wonder if I shouldn’t have kept it for myself, and moved it to some place, some completely imaginary place, in the garden where there is room for a gigantic rose.

The best autumn foliage on any plant, in my opinion, comes from Rosa virginiana, but that’s yet another plant recovering from the fence project earlier this year, so publicity photos will have to wait.