the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to talk about an abrupt change in our weather. You may remember me from such similarly-themed posts as “How Things Change”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
I was napping, and when I got up, I wondered where the guy I live with was, so I wandered out into the back yard, and there he was, with his phone, taking pictures.

The weather here has changed. Yesterday it was 98 degrees F (36.6C); today it was 60 (15.5C). It’s raining right now. Not a lot, but enough, I guess.
The cooler weather is a relief, of course, though there’s been some expressions of melancholy from the other sentient being in the house. I have this idea that autumn should be both delightful and full of melancholy, so I didn’t ask him what was going on. The weather is fine with me.

He went around the garden and took some pictures with his phone.
The cow-pen daisies again.
Four-wing saltbush (Atriplex canescens) in fruit:
Eriogonum jamesii:
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium:
And, since I was talking about sedums in my last post, here’s ‘Xenox’ in flower:
Foliage of the sedum ‘Jose Aubergine’:
I thought this could be more in focus, but the guy I live with struggled to get a picture that showed the real color.

That would be it for this post, even though we could have posted more pictures (except for the fact that the guy I live with just plain forgot to take more pictures), like of all the red-flowered plants in the garden which are for the hummingbirds, but he did have his camera turned on when he walked by the feeder, and saw this:
The hummingbird wasn’t frightened of him at all. I hear they need lots of sugar for their long flights down to Mexico; we’re seeing fewer and fewer of them every day. Sad for us, because we like seeing them, but good for the hummingbirds, who don’t like to be cold.

That’s all I have for today. It’s still raining, a little, and it might be time for the guy I live with to get out the wool blanket for tonight; I’d much rather be a little chilly than roasting hot, because we place a high value on being cozy here.

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 talk about just one plant. You may remember me from such posts as “How To Avoid Gardening”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Those pots are mostly hens-and-chicks, though there is a pot of a not-very-hardy agave, Pinus strobiformis ‘Loma Linda’, and some pathetic herbs. Holy basil just to the right on me.
The guy I live with bought two of those pines, which are dwarf, earlier this year (they weren’t cheap); he planted one and it died pretty quickly. He forgot to water it and said he knew better, but got distracted when it was so hot here.
This one, way over on the left of the picture, will be planted later; maybe in a pot, where it will be fine.

Well that wasn’t the plant I’m going to talk about, but I got carried away.

We had a ten percent chance of rain yesterday, but around nine last night, storms moved through Denver, and we got some rain. It rained pretty hard for a little while.
The guy I live with said if we lived farther east we would have gotten a lot more rain; there was a terrific display of lightning out east, according to the guy I live with. I was hiding in my Upstairs Fort.

It’s not like the garden needs all that much rain; just the normal amount would be nice.

Yesterday there was a card on our front door from the electric company saying that they were going to do some work in our yard.
The guy I live with freaked out, imagining all sorts of gigantic equipment tearing up the “way back”, so he called the electric company to talk to the person in charge of all of this to see what was what. While he was talking to this person the tiny rational part of his brain kicked in, and he realized that he had been involved with work like this before, but with telephone cable, and the “way back” wasn’t going to be dug up, they just needed access to the electrical box in the corner of our yard.

So today a lot of work was done, clearing out dead chokecherries that blocked the way to the electrical box. He said he knew how frustrating and annoying it was to have to work around overgrown shrubs and stuff, and now everything is ready for the people who are coming to do the work.
You can see the telephone pedestal now; the electrical box is behind the two chairs no one sits in any more.
You can also see me, and the little wren house (the guy I live with calls it a “wren wranch”) on the chair, and another one on the arbor.
The snow fence is where the very first part of the garden was started; now it’s mostly just the Persian yellow rose growing there.

And the groups of Sedum telephium ‘Matrona’, which is the plant I’m going to talk about. It’s a German cultivar that does very well here with only occasional watering. (The guy I live with says he likes it better than ‘Autumn Joy’, another German cultivar also known as ‘Herbstfreude’ which is its real name.)
There’s also Alcea rugosa (the upright plants which are done flowering and should be cut down), Stachys byzantina ‘Helene von Stein’ (also known as ‘Big Ears’), and the ‘Gray Gleam’ juniper that’s been broken by snow many times.

Here’s another picture, taken on our evening walk.
The guy I live with set the sprinkler before we went on our walk, to water that part of the buffalo grass that was drying out (you can see it in the picture before this one) after my Private Lawn was mowed.

When the guy I live with was working back there, he noticed how good the sedums looked, and that they were covered with bees. Bees everywhere.
I tried to eat a couple, but the guy I live with told me not to. I still tried, anyway.
That’s a lot of bees.

I don’t know where the phrase “the bee’s knees” came from, though maybe just because it rhymes, but I’ve never seen any knees on bees.
Whatever; there are a lot of bees on the sedums.

That’s all I have for today. It was more than I was planning, but things are like that.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me walking past yet more chokecherries, and some plums, toward a couple of ducks who thought I was out to get them. I wasn’t, but I appreciated their sense of how tough and deadly I look.
Those ducks are the ducklings I posted pictures of a while ago. All grown up now.

Until next time, then.