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 up to date on various things. You may remember me from such posts as “Equinoxious Weather”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.You might be able to see how cut-down everything looks. Today was a nice day for working.

The guy I live with said there was a drawback to having all these native warm-season grasses in the garden, especially at this time of year, because they’re brown.
That little tree is the Prunus andersonii hybrid with purple leaves that’s going to be trialed for Plant Select, I think.
The guy I live with said he should plant some crocuses in the buffalo grass so things might not be so brown, though he doesn’t care all that much about that.
There are some crocuses, regular ones, in the grass now.
I think there should be more. Ones like ‘Snowbunting’, ‘Blue Pearl’, and so on.
The grass wouldn’t get mowed–if it gets mowed at all–after the crocus leaves wither in late spring.
It looks a little less brown where there are gravel paths.
Here’s a view across what used to be a rock garden, looking almost right into the sun. You might be able to see that the grass in the field is turning green.
There are quite a few crocuses in flower. This is Crocus ancyrensis ‘Golden Bunch’.
This is Crocus alatavicus.There was a lot of raking today, after the guy I live with came back from the store. I supervised.
Here I am supervising in another part of the garden.
Mostly what happened today was raking pine needle mulch off the bulbs, especially the cyclamen. This one should have had the mulch removed earlier.
The cyclamen without mulch are flowering, too, but the guy I live with was concerned about the soil freezing, the way it has the last few winters. The cyclamen don’t like that.
While the guy I live with was wandering around where the cyclamen are, I heard him say “Ha!”, which he only sometimes does. He said it was “A Holmesian cry of triumph.”
This is the Iranian snowdrop, Galanthus transcaucasicus, from the area around the southern Caspian Sea (Iran and Azerbaijan).
There’s another one a few feet away. I heard another “Ha!”.

So then he went to look at something else from Iran. A lot of common garden bulbs are from that part of the world, but he was especially interested in one thing.
He got distracted by seedlings of the central Asian onion, Allium pskemense. They’re kind of funny-looking.
But then there was another “Ha!”, when he found what he went over to look for, emerging leaves of Colchicum haussknechtii. Some say this is a synonym for C. persicum.
Even though this has been a long, rough winter, and we’re still supposed to get more cold weather later this week, the guy I live with was very pleased to see these leaves. There’s another corm pushing up leaves a little distance away.
They had a rough first winter because they were planted so late, but they made it through that winter, and this last one, too.
But seeing these emerging plants made everything we’ve had to endure lately seem like it was almost worth it.

So, dear friends, that’s my post for today. They say it might rain tomorrow. It rained for about fifteen seconds last night. I guess we’ll see about tomorrow and the coming days.

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 bring you as up to date as is caninely possible on all the thrilling changes here. You may remember me from such thrilling posts as “Helping In The Garden”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m in my Surveying Mode.
You may notice a whole lot less ice, though there’s a bit by the round pot on my left. It’s 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15C), and the humidity is a whopping 12 percent.
It might rain tomorrow, or we might get a check for several million dollars in the mail. One is just as possible as the other.
And then it’s supposed to snow on Thursday. The guy I live with is fine with that. The more water for the garden, the better.

The guy I live with has been “bingeing” on “Midsomer Murders” again, instead of gardening (though he didn’t watch the episode with his book in it), because he says it’s nice to have human voices in the house, even if some of those voices belong to people who don’t make it through to the end of the episode.

In the meantime, I like to lie in the sun, in my favorite lying-in-the-sun place.
It’s an empty area of the garden that will aways remain empty, just because. Though right behind me is a little raised bed with some of the “bulk” snowdrops.

They’ll probably be transplanted in a few weeks.
I think you can see them here, though since this is a particularly sunny part of the yard they may be hard to see. Some of these didn’t make it to the end of the episode, either, but the guy I live with is pretty pleased with the success rate. (There are others elsewhere in the garden.)
They won’t be very happy here in the summer. Like most other things people go on about, snowdrops really don’t need the exact same conditions they find in the wild, but this little area will get really hot in the summer, and is difficult to water.

Since this has been a very long winter for us, a lot of the snowdrops here are late, but the guy I live with did say that there have been snowdrops in flower here for six months now. Well, on and off, because of all the snow.
This is Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus, which we’d expect to flower here at the end of January, but the guy I live with didn’t think the soil would freeze where it was planted. (If someone had told him, years ago, that the soil would be frozen here for months on end, he would have thought them a lunatic, but here we are.)
This is going to be transplanted to a place where it’s sunnier in the winter.

The guy I live with found a clump of “regular” Galanthus plicatus in the shade garden. He doesn’t remember planting a bulb in this spot, but, whatever.
This may have been the first winter ever that the soil froze in the shade garden, but it did rain quite a bit, last December, before it got cold.
The soil is nice leafy soil, with well over thirty years’ worth of leaves falling on it.
There are some named snowdrops in the shade garden, too.
This is ‘Lapwing’.
This is ‘Mrs. Backhouse No.12’.
This is ‘Warei’, an old variety, named back when fake Latin names were acceptable for cultivar names.
The guy I live with says that the “escaped” snowdrops are more interesting, maybe because they don’t want to live in the shade garden.
(That cage is for a little oak grown from acorns collected by the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, New Mexico; rabbits ate it halfway down to the ground a couple of winters ago.)
There are other things in flower, too, like crocuses.
Some Cyclamen coum under the park bench. These were self-sown, too, like the snowdrops. We’re nice to our ants here.
An early Iris reticulata.
The striped thing is Crocus stridii.

And Colchicum bulbocodium. It used to be called Bulbocodium vernum until botanists decided it was a colchicum.
Well, so, not only is it supposed to snow in a couple of days, it’s also going to get cold, and the guy I live with is irked that some bulbs are emerging “too early”, but he said they’ll probably be okay. If not, they can be covered with pine needles, of which we have a lot.

That’s my report for today. I hope you found it at least slightly interesting. We’re almost done talking about snowdrops, too.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me in another of my favorite places.

Until next time, then.