the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to start the new year off with a morality tale, or something close to it. You may remember me from such posts as “A Chilly Interlude”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m waiting for the guy I live with to come out and work in the garden.
The guy I live with said he might consider cutting down all the grasses, because it makes the garden look browner than it really is, but then some people say to leave everything so that insects have shelter for eggcases and things like that. Cutting down grasses is work, even with the very sharp Japanese grass sickle.

Geranium macrorrhizum is still very green under the snow. Last winter it was completely defoliated by the cold, which the guy I live with said he had never seen before.
And here’s Lilium candidum. The leaves stay more or less green all winter. This is one you plant very shallowly in early autumn, so it can do this.
And Genista villarsii, a dwarf broom. This has been here for years.
Satureja spinosa, grown from seeds and planted out last year, I think. This is from Crete.
Heuchera ‘Chiqui’, a pink coralbells which has been here for many years.
And this is not to mention all the cyclamen, conifers, and so on.

Well, so, the guy I live with has been thinking about ordering some bulbs from overseas again, despite the fact that his last order, from England, never showed up, and it involved kind of a lot of money.
He still wanted some crocuses, and more snowdrops (there’s a place in England that takes care of all the necessary permits), and he looked through the catalogs and wondered what he was doing, wanting all these plants.
He thought about buying a hundred or so “bulk” Galanthus elwesii a couple of months ago but then realized, like he didn’t know already, that there are more of these snowdrops in the garden here than in most gardens in this country.

He’d been involved in rock gardening for years, and one of the typical attributes was wanting plants, Want, want, want. Especially rare plants that are difficult to grow.
Now most of those plants are long dead, and he thought about this for a while today. All the wanting, all the money spent ultimately for nothing, and he thought he might actually be happier wanting less.

So, and even though he’s still planning to order some bulbs later this year, he decided it was time to let go of a lot of this desire.

He said “Let’s go out and do some work.” I was all for that, though I don’t do much actual work. It’s more like supervising.

On the way out to “The Enclosure” he took a picture of the buds on Viburnum farreri. They could be open later this month, depending on the weather, of course.

And then look what happened.
All the broken trellises at the top of the fence were removed, and all the cedar boards from the panel on the left were removed. The boards were put in the shed.

The guy I live with dug the postholes; his wife built the fence. He felt very strange dismantling the fence, but he said there are so many other memories of her, in the house, the garden, the shed, the arbors, and so on, that it was time for him to let go of this, and make a commitment to rebuilding the fence, as I said in my last post.
In other words, rebuilding the fence, instead of just looking at the broken fence and heaving a sigh, because his wife loved the little space she made for herself in that garden.

The crossarm (you can see the dado his wife cut into the 4×4 in the picture above) was all rotted and the guy I live with was worried the whole panel might fall on me, so that’s why this work was begun today.
The rotting is due to the fairly regular watering this little garden gets. That, and squirrels constantly gnawing on the wood. The wood could have been painted but the guy I live with and his wife were against that.

Now, you can’t see that the fence on the western side of the enclosure slants to the south, because the trellis on top has been removed. You can’t see the western side of the fence at all; just the fence the guy I live with put up some years ago. (The one section on the right does slant a little because it’s not permanently attached to the other section.)
And if all that brown stuff were cut down, the garden might look less brown. (That’s some kind of mathematical thing, I guess. Or maybe it’s a logical proposition of some kind.)

That was my day. A lot better than yesterday, with firecrackers going off when I was on my evening walk, and then for hours, around midnight.
I’ll leave you with a picture doing one of my favorite things, standing halfway out of the door. Hopefully the heat wasn’t on while I was doing this.

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 wish you all a Happy New Year and to show some pictures. You may remember me from such posts as “H.N.Y.”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s probably obvious what the weather is like here, though it’s not very cold during the day. Or the night, either.

I’m not going to review the year, really; I just thought the title was kind of funny.

The guy I live with took a picture of the sleepygrass (Achnatherum robustum) at night.
It still hasn’t been knocked over by the snow.
He also took a picture of me. Those are my white legs, if you couldn’t tell.
He also took a couple of atmospheric pictures of the willows a couple of evenings ago.
The willows are kind of interesting. They have a tendency to break (I think these are Salix amygdaloides); even very large branches can be broken by the snow, especially if they’ve been drilled by flickers for nests.
The extra-creepy willow got some part of it broken off a while ago.
I had to inspect the fallen part. You can see all the nest cavities there.
I know that right near the creepy willow there’s a spot where the creek can be crossed without the guy I live with having to pull himself up the other bank, which would never work, these days. I mean if he had to, he could, but he doesn’t want to have to.
I don’t know why the creek bed is so shallow here. I guess it just is. The water definitely doesn’t stay in the creek bed when there’s a lot of water; the area where the guy I live with was standing is completely flooded, and soggy for days afterward.
On the other side, where I am, there used to be a big jumble of pretty large branches from the willow tree on that side of the bank; I think the flood we had in June washed them away, and now they’re lodged farther down the creek.

I’d also like to show you how attractive our garden has become.
Look closely at the incredibly artistic skill with which the guy I live with covered the potted snowdrops.
The snowdrops don’t really need that covering but the guy I live with decided to do it anyway. He could have cut the frost cloth to fit, but said he didn’t feel like it, and so now I have this to look at. We aren’t going to have any garden tours for while, fortunately.
The autumn-flowering crocuses (the ones that have overwintering leaves) have their cages now. If they don’t have cages, rabbits will eat the leaves, which is bad for the crocuses.
The guy I live with said that you either put cages around the crocuses, or you don’t have crocuses. I know it’s my job to chase rabbits out of the garden, and I do that, but somehow they get in anyway. We still haven’t figured out how they’re getting in, unless they fly in.

Speaking of protecting plants, the guy I live with wrapped the little roses in “the enclosure”.
He ran out of burlap for the last cage; you can see the green metal stakes where the unwrapped rose is.
These roses came from High Country Rosarium, this year. They all looked green and healthy before they were wrapped.
He ordered some last year, from a different place, but all the little roses died during that really bad winter we had. He should have covered them with soil before it got cold, but he forgot to, and that was that for the poor little roses.

I hear that there’s a plan to replace the fence in the enclosure. I’ve been hearing that for some time now. And talking about it, too. The guy I live with removed a few of the cedar boards for some purpose, as you can see.
It won’t take all that much work to fix; the difficulty is in starting the project. Like with so many other things.
Hopefully by the end of next year you’ll be able to see the new fence.

So that’s all I have for the last day of the year.

Until next time, then.