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 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.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a rant, and some other things as well. You may remember me from such posts as “Retro Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If the path under the arbor looks like it’s been raked, that’s because it has. We’ve been very busy today.

The first thing that happened today, though, after my walk and the guy I live with’s breakfast, is that a book arrived. A book he’d been looking forward to reading in the coming weeks.
You should have heard what he said when he opened the package.
The book smelled of some kind of perfumey disinfectant. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but the guy I live with said it stank so badly he couldn’t hold it in his hands, and so put it in a plastic bag with some baking soda (in a spice bag), hoping the stench would disappear.
And he made a resolution to buy books locally from now on. The pandemic changed the way he bought things, but he said now it’s time to go back to the old ways.

I’ll continue this theme, but first I want to show you some plants in the garden.
The guy I live with was sad to see what had happened to this cactus. He grew it from seed about twenty-five years ago.
It’s dead. Probably killed by the rain we had last December.

There are snowdrops, of course; mostly flowering later than usual.
This is Galanthus nivalis.
This is Crocus chrysanthus ‘Snowbunting’, a month late. It was raised by E.A.Bowles and is still one of the best.
A species Iris reticulata.
One of the tuberous geraniums from Iran (yes, an Iranian geranium) is up, all over the place.
Speaking of all over the place, the guy I live with was mildly surprised to see what Corydalis glaucescens had done. Despite the fact that this is said to grow in the shade of shrubs on north-facing slopes in places like Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, it obviously does very well on this south-facing slope. It’s self-fertile, unlike some other species here.
Pretty funny, in a way, because the others in this same garden are not easy to grow at all. Not even slightly. I know because of what I hear the guy I live with say.

Well, so, anyway, the guy I live with spent a few hours cutting down more grasses and stuff, using his fancy Japanese grass sickle.
It’s carbon steel, so it takes a serious edge. (I could do a rant for the guy I live with about carbon versus stainless steel, but maybe later.) It wasn’t very expensive, but is a wonderful tool.
He opened a new box of trash bags, and I thought he was going to throw up. The ensuing language was a bit much for my tender ears.
“The world”, he said, “has gone mad. Perfumed trash bags?”

It’s bad enough, he said, that people today wear so much “fragrance” you can smell them from twenty-five feet away (our neighbors, are, of course, much, much worse in that respect); people need to be able to breathe. Breathing is pretty important.
“Why”, he asked, “are all these sickeningly strong ‘fragrances’ suddenly a thing?”
And now we have perfumed trash bags.

The smell was on his hands, and it wouldn’t wash off. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this stench clean from my hand?” he cried, standing at the sink. Eventually after several washings, I think the smell was gone.
The patio and the garden, though, reek.

Fortunately the guy I live with has an ample supply of masks.

A lot of what was cleaned up today went into the trash bag rather than the compost pile.
We could smell the trash bag even when it was out in the garden. The guy I live with said that if Sartre were writing Nausea today, it would have been about existential trash bags.
The guy I live with might give the rest of the bags to a neighbor who doesn’t mind the smell, if someone like that actually exists.

We purebred border collies, I hasten to add, almost always smell fresh and clean.

And that, dear friends, is my partially-ranting post for today.

Until next time, then.