the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it I is, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you yet another didactic post. You may remember me from such posts as “The Peony”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It was a pretty nice day, despite being depressingly, though not horrifyingly, dry.

The guy I live with did a tiny bit of work in the garden, being very careful about his back. One of the things he talked about was how there was very little precise information about things like planting bulbs. He said advice like “plant bulbs in well-drained soil” is beyond meaningless, since bulbs don’t grow in “well-drained soil” in real life; they grow mostly in clay soil, which is impenetrable to summer rain and protects the bulbs from drying out.
He said a more reasonable statement would be “If you live in an area with lots of summer rain, then you’re going to need to find a way to keep bulbs from getting too wet during their summer dormancy.”

So we were already off to a great start.

He said there’s very little precise information with some bulbs on which side is up. Tulips and daffodils are obvious, but some are not. Some even have no obvious “right side up”, like corydalis, but those are exceptions.
He got some bulbs of Brodiaea (or Triteleia) ‘Rudy’, and they were not super easy to tell which side was up, without looking very closely.
He did still plant some upside-down, but saw his mistake before he covered the corms with soil.

up

down

The guy I live said a lot of this was trial and error, also sometimes involving looking at bulbs with a 20X lens.
Some people say if you’re not sure which side is up to plant the bulbs on a slant, which he’s tried, with variable results.
“There are no classes for beginners in life”, he said, quoting Rilke.

With erythroniums, you plant them with the round end down, even if it looks like the roots are on the other end. (The guy I live with has planted erythroniums upside-down. They didn’t emerge the next spring.)

Just today, the guy I live with made a comment on Facebook  that the “saffron crocus” pictured on the post of a “garden influencer” were Crocus speciosus. He said to me that there was no wonder the “influencer” had never harvested saffron.
Crocus speciosus like these:
The picture below has been posted before. This is Crocus speciosus, a watercolor done by the guy I live with’s late wife when she was a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators.
This hung in the Smithsonian for a while.
You can see in the lower left that the corm and cormlets (or cormels) have roots.

Since he’s been checking bulbs growing in pond baskets to make sure they have roots before winter sets in, he took these corms of Crocus laevigatus out of a basket.
You can see that new corms have emerged from the dry husk of last year’s corm, with flowering shoots. The species name laevigatus means “smooth”, referring to the smooth tunic on the corm, which is very appearent.
You can also see that something is missing. The energy of the emerging flowering shoot is going to be sapped if the corm can’t pull water from the soil via roots, so he replanted these and watered them thoroughly. Maybe we’ll check on them in a week.

I know it’s a surprise that the content of this post has turned to crocus, but here’s Crocus cartwrightianus again. The guy I live with thinks this is the selection called ‘Marcel.
And this is Crocus cartwrightianus ‘Halloween’ again.
Maybe not too much difference between the two, but ‘Halloween’ is always later by a week or two.

Here’s a Crocus mathewii, too. Another saffron crocus.

I think that brings today’s didactic post to an end. Just another day of the two of us not doing much, though I did get to chase a rabbit. That was highly enjoyable; I didn’t catch the rabbit if you were worried.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to bring you up to date on things in our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “A Discovery”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a sort of characteristic pose.
If I look shocked, that’s because a squirrel was drinking out of the bird bath. The same bird bath I sometimes drink out of.
Squirrel lips in the birdbath, how totally gross.

You can see the patio is in some disarray. The guy I live with dragged out the two charcoal grills to give away; he’s never going to use them again.

Yesterday it was really windy, though I hear not as windy as in Denver, where trees were blown over. We had a “red flag” warning all day, and then a freeze warning for last night. It didn’t freeze here.
We’re not really in a drought, though we’ve only had about half the average precipitation for this month.
This snowdrop was very brave.

Galanthus bursanus.

Bulbs of this species have been flowering here for a month now, and you can see there’s another one almost ready, in the upper left hand corner of the picture.

The guy I live with hurt his shoulder, and then hurt his back. He said he hadn’t hurt his back like this for over thirty years, when he worked outside.
He said it was times like this where not having his wife here to help him out of bed really emphasized the loss; they were there for each other every single day.
It takes him about an hour to figure out how to get out of bed without making things worse. I couldn’t help. He had a back brace delivered, so I was able to go on my morning walks, but not my evening ones.
We were able to walk around the garden today.

This is the fairly tiny Cyclamen intaminatum. That’s the tip of the guy I live with’s cane to show how small this cyclamen is.
The cyclamen is native to the province in Turkey that the snowdrop pictured before it is, as well as a couple of other provinces.

And there are crocuses. Of course there are crocuses.
There are hundreds of Crocus speciosus in flower here now. Ants are attracted to the sugary coating on the seeds, the elaiosome, and they carry seeds all over the garden.
I’m only going to show a few.
That moth is alive, by the way.

This next one is something the guy I live with thinks might be a form of Crocus cartwrightianus.
It’s certainly a member of the saffron crocus section; you can tell by the orange styles.
And all are synanthous, so they have overwintering leaves which have to be protected against rabbits, with hardware cloth cages pinned into the ground, which the guy I live with admits is very tiresome, but, according to him, way less tiresome than having to bring in plants for the winter. He doesn’t do much of that.
He just got some Messina Wildlife Animal Stopper, too, since I’ve become less interested in chasing rabbits out of the garden than I used to be.
Crocus cartwrightianus ‘Marcel’ has just started to flower.
And this is Crocus cartwrightianus ‘Halloween’. It has a few days to get really going, as you can tell by its name.
I’ll post more pictures next week, unless it snows. The guy I live with said he does hope it snows, so we don’t have to hear about “red flag warnings”. The snow doesn’t affect the crocuses much; of course snowed-on flowers wither, but new ones appear.

Here’s a terrible picture of a snapdragon.
The guy I live with got this at a nursery; it was labeled Antirrhinum braun-blanquetii (whew, huh), but it isn’t; that species has pale yellow flowers. It’s just a hybrid that has lived here for many years and seeded around.

Some bulbs came in the mail today; the guy I live with only ordered a few this year. Imagine his annoyance when he saw the bag of Galanthus woronowii, the same snowdrops he bought at the nursery a few weeks ago.
He said it might be a good idea to make an actual note of what he orders online. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened.
And maybe to make a note to order some snapdragon seeds; they’re fairly perennial here and tolerate drought quite well.

With all these words you might think we had an exciting day, but really, not much happened.
For me, the major thing was the guy I live with’s decision to get one of the afghans from the upstairs closet and lay it on the couch for extra back support. He didn’t straighten everything out like he usually does, though. The afghan has a nice sweet scent to it because the closet does; the guy I live with says it smells like his wife’s Christmas, since she stored her holiday stuff there too.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me giving it a test run.

Until next time, then.