the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you about the stuff that got done recently. You may remember me from such posts as “House Of A Different Color”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. You might have to look closely.
The thing is, there’s a new block of suet in the feeder hanging pretty close to me, and the squirrel thinks it’s for him. It isn’t. But he keeps trying to get to it, so it’s my job to make sure he doesn’t.

The guy I live with has been watering, because it hasn’t rained at all so far this month, which isn’t all that unusual for here, these days, but it’s distressing to him. I can tell.
Watering has helped the plants of Salvia greggii flower more than they normally would in a dry period.
I know this is a crummy picture of ‘Grenadine’, but then, I didn’t take it.
The ones on the south side of the house are doing well, too. There are a lot of plants.
The Wasatch or bigtooth maples, Acer grandidentatum, have had nice color this year.
This maple is native from I think Montana all the way south into northern Mexico. The guy I live with planted a couple called ‘Manzano’, from the Manzano Mountains of New Mexico, but that’s a place far enough south that the plants didn’t turn color in autumn; the leaves just went brown. This is called consequential dormancy, going dormant because it suddenly gets cold, rather than the usual predictive dormancy, where plants prepare for cold weather, like the leaves turning color and so on.
Which is fine, but if you plant something for autumn color and it doesn’t have any, there’s not much point.

You can see the fence, which is slightly in front of the maples, and that makes the beginning of what’s always been called “the way back”, as in “way back” in the garden, because you can’t see it from the patio.
The fence is where “the enclosure” is; the guy I live with’s wife made that garden for herself, and it’s had a difficult time since she died.
Since it’s falling apart, some, the fence is being replaced. It takes quite a bit of time for the guy I live with to get things done.

He cleared out a bunch of the vinca that had grown over the flagstone his wife set, so that now the crocuses (Crocus speciosus) can flower. This was taken from the bench in the enclosure.
Most of the dirt you see there needs to be swept away, because it’s covering the flagstone.
There’s a good view of the maples, one of them, anyway, from the bench.There is a big deal going on in the enclosure, and a very big deal at that.

About a dozen years ago, the guy I live with transplanted the huge Paeonia rockii that was growing in the front yard back to the enclosure. It was his wife’s favorite plant, and she took lots of pictures of it in flower.
He was super-worried that the peony would die after it was moved, but it didn’t.
On the other hand, it hasn’t flowered since it was transplanted, it’s only a third the size it used to be, and the leaves get sunburned because the sumac shading it died a couple of years ago.
The guy I live with thought about this for a couple of years, and decided it to dig it up, after the leaves fall off. (They sometimes turn a beautiful purple and red.)
It’s going to take a truck ride, and be planted in Plantasia at Denver Botanic Gardens, where it will have a good home.
He said people have blathered a lot to him about “letting go”, after his wife died; well, this is really letting go, and he feels okay about it.
The “Autumn Joy” sedums in front of it are going to go, too, but to a neighbor’s.
Some new plants have been ordered, to go in their place.

Aside from the enclosure work, the guy I live with did a bunch of work in the way back border. I hear that years ago it was packed with perennials, but watered all the time, when my Private Lawn was bluegrass rather than the buffalo grass in it now.
The border on the east side of my lawn gets watered fairly regularly (that means about once every ten days or so), and there are crocuses there, too.
This is where the Sedum ‘Matrona’ and big lambs’ ears are.
But the border along the back fence, the way back border itself, is another story.
The soil here is like dust, so what he did was completely cut down the ‘President Lincoln’ lilac, another plant that rarely if ever flowers, and planted an Austrian Copper rose there. You can hardly see it in this picture, but it’s to the left of the ‘Annabel’ lilac, which is going to stay.
The roses will tolerate the very dry conditions in this border quite well. I say “roses” because there’s another Austrian Copper, and a Persian yellow rose (the Austrian Copper was a sport of it), and a Rosa xanthina.
The guy I live with wanted native dryland shrubs to go there, but the roses were easier to find.

So that it’s, for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me relaxing in my usual way. Gardening is very hard work, after all.

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 tell you about what’s been going on lately. You may remember me from such posts as “Late At Night”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s still really dry here. We get rain, but just in the form of sprinkles from time to time.
This isn’t normal for us, but the guy I live with said he would just water the garden, some.

Still, there are things in flower.
This is Sternbergia lutea. Bulbs of this have been here for about thirty years, but they don’t always flower. He divided some and planted them in another part of the garden, and they’re flowering. The older clumps aren’t.
He said that if it rained, there might be more flowers. He can be very profound.
There are some crocuses, too. This is Crocus puringii:
One flower appeared away from the main group, and it’s not open today because it’s too chilly. (It’s 46 degrees F, or 8 C.)
If you remember that one area of the “way back” I showed pictures of a while ago, in “Exciting Times”, the guy I live with dug out all the grass the other day. He wasn’t used to working that much, and it tired him out. The soil was dry as a bone, though. I know how dry that is because there are bones in the field; the kind of bones people buy for dogs, though I don’t care for such things. Why they’re out in the field is a mystery.

This is what it looks like now, if you were walking out in the field and looked into the garden.
This is a picture taken when it was darker, looking toward the house, when we were on my evening walk. You can see the Sedum ‘Matrona’ and the red leaves of Acer grandidentatum.
This was taken on another walk, later in the evening.  The guy I live with said it reminded him of “The Empire of Light”, a famous painting by Magritte.
That’s the light on our patio.

We often walk at night, now.
He took this picture one night when it had rained a little. Kind of scary if you ask me.
The guy I live with has a headlamp that he wears on his hat; it’s sometimes necessary because there are lots of fallen apples and crabapples in the field.
I can see better than he can, and usually guide him away from things he might trip over. He said that back in the last century there would have been raccoons all over those apples, but we haven’t seen any raccoons since I was little. Maybe they know I’m around, and avoid my deadly demeanor.

The nighttime walks are nice. Besides raccoons, I haven’t seen any striped kitties or owls in quite a while.

This is me, if you weren’t sure, walking toward the same spot, on a different evening. That line of bushes is where the creek is.

And here I am again, in the dark, at the end of the path. This is where we turn around and go home.
I think home is a good place to be.

Until next time, then.