the miserable gardener

This pathetic thing is a flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, after a month in my care. (Not the same one I posted about earlier.) I planted it, watered it, and then forgot about it. I only remembered it when I went out to set the sprinkler in the shade garden because all the hellebores were wilted to the ground. (Set a sprinkler to make it rain.)

I dug it up, put it in a pot and set it in a bucket of water, so that the remaining leaves could be battered by hail. I have no doubt it’s thrilled to be under my care.

“One dogwood is bad enough, but two?”

In my defense, I’m a weak-willed gardener. See plants for sale, buy them. Think about where they will go in the garden, and their cultural requirements later. Or not at all.

This is the result. I plan to give this away to someone who will actually take care of it.

Now, what can I plant in that empty space?

Gardeners are supposed to be sound asleep after midnight, but not me. A thunderstorm passed over the house after we went to bed, so I had to comfort a terrified border collie for over an hour, then it started to hail.

Sirens went off. Tornado sirens; you can hear those for miles, but went I got up out of bed, I could tell they were all around me, so I turned on the TV. The National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning for, well, my house. I got discouraged pretty quickly, dragged the dog down to the entrance to the crawl space, and waited to be lifted to Oz.

And people wonder why I like dry weather.

We waited, and waited, as the rain poured down and the windows shook from thunder, and eventually the tornado warning was lifted, though the lightning display was something else. I tried to take a picture with the Coolpix but this is all I got.

This is not “normal” weather for my part of the Denver Metro area; the rain shadow of Mount Evans usually keeps my little neighborhood dry, while the rain falls further to the east. It doesn’t do much good to run outside and shout that this isn’t normal weather; I tried it anyway.

Now I have a mess to clean up. Eventually.

P.S. (Added at 7:30 this morning.) Write a post at one in the morning, you forget stuff. They were predicting severe storms yesterday so at 7 a.m.  I took a picture of what a morning with tornado warnings looks like in my little world. (The night picture looks southeast from the front, this picture looks southwest from the back. The grass in the field is smooth brome….)

What I could use right now is a hot, dry wind to blow all the leaves away. Instead of me cleaning them up, I mean.