the miserable gardener

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.

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 being you a partly interesting post on a partly interesting day. You may remember me from such posts as “More Changes”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is my favorite place to relax, especially after a partly interesting day.
The guy I live with said all the purebred border collies have loved this ninety-year-old creaky couch. He sometimes takes an afternoon nap on this couch when it’s not occupied.

Today was only partly interesting because I was left alone for a while. The guy I live with did come back with some biscuits for me, so all was not lost.

As I mentioned, this post may only be partly interesting so I’m going to start with that.
Here is Crocus niveus again. This is native to the Mani Peninsula in Greece. I know it’s really difficult to believe that the place isn’t named for me, but my name is Sanskrit and has nothing to do with Greek peninsulas. Or crocuses.
The Latin word niveus means “snowy” or “snow white”, but you can see that these aren’t.

You may wonder why this crocus was given that name. E.A. Bowles described it in The Gardener’s Chronicle in 1900 from plants he had growing in his garden.
“This handsome species is now flowering here [at Myddleton House] in a cold frame and at Kew in the open border. It is remarkably robust and vigorous, and quite the best white-flowered autumn Crocus I have ever seen…”

Apparently Bowles only saw ones that were white.
This sort of thing happens often and so the guy I live with isn’t going to fault Bowles, who was an expert on crocuses as you can see here. (The print is hard to read.)
https://www.eabowlessociety.org.uk/crocus
Very nice watercolors too.
Bowles raised crocuses from seed and you can still get his spring-flowering crocus ‘Snow Bunting’ which was one of the guy I live with’s wife’s favorite spring crocuses.

This is Crocus goulimyi ‘Mani White’. Again not named for me.
You can see this species is also synanthous so the leaves will have to be caged against rabbits, with an occasional spraying of Messina Wildlife’s Rabbit Stopper, which makes the leaves taste icky. It’s safe for me, if you wanted to know.
The guy I live with has had a terrible time trying to keep Crocus goulimyi, which is usually kind of a blue-purple, in the garden, but these have survived, probably because he made sure to water them well after they were planted.
The life cycle of these autumnal crocuses which flower with leaves is different from autumna; colchicums in that the mother corm needs roots in order to flower and produce leaves.

This is Sternbergia sicula.
The leaves are narrower and floppier than those on Sternbergia lutea, and “for some dumb reason” the guy I live with, who should know better according to him, kept thinking about sickles.
The Latin word for sickle is falx (like in falcate leaves), so why he thought about sickles is beyond me. He still claimed the leaves sort of looked like sickles.
The specific epithet sicula means Sicilian.

So that was the partly interesting part.
I’m not sure you can imagine what it’s like to be a sophisticated purebred border collie and have to live with stuff like not totally-white crocuses, and sickles.

But on my evening walk, there was something much more interesting reflected in the guy I live with’s headlamp.
Those shafts of light are from the apartment complex near us.
Just what we needed at this time of year, eyes glowing in the dark.
Eventually the eyes, and the horrible demonic creature that had them, went away.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going on my walk, but the guy I live with with said it was okay, and we kept going.
I was astonishingly brave.

I walked almost to the end of the canal road, and then we turned around to go home.
I didn’t see any more glowing eyes.

Until next time, then.