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 talk about the viburnum and some other things. You may remember me from such posts as “The Long Lead”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
Once again, it may look very dry here but the soil is quite damp just an inch below the surface. We got about four or five inches of snow ten days ago.
However.
I put that word in a sentence by itself because even that much snow seems to have no effect on the guy I live with’s peace of mind.
He suffers from considerable anxiety, and is seeing someone about it, and even with all that snow, there was the wind.
It melted all the snow, as you can see.
Last Thursday he went out to lunch with his friend, and when he came back he saw there was a “fire weather” warning. It turned out that this was for places to the north of us, but that didn’t make him feel calm.
And then the next day, when he had an appointment, there was another warning, and our house was right in “the pink zone” So he canceled the appointment to stay home with me.
I do appreciate this, by the way.
It turned out we got almost no wind.

He explained that anxiety is irrational, and no amount of rational thinking, which he does from time to time, can help that. He looked at a map of fire stuff and we’re in a “low risk” zone but that didn’t help. There is of course the thing that happened before I came here that he still has to live with, and I can tell that’s been affecting him in the last year or so, more than usual.

I guess I understand all that because when I find something scary and have to hide in my upstairs fort the guy I live with often comes up and talks to me softly about how things are really okay, but it doesn’t seem to help much.
There was a time when the wind was blowing so hard a few years ago I was terrified, and didn’t want to go outside. We did go out, but the guy I live with clipped a leash onto my collar so I wouldn’t blow away.

And then yesterday there was yet another warning, but we didn’t get much wind.
The snowdrops didn’t care at all.
This is Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’, which is fine with freezing weather, since it doesn’t freeze when everything else does. He got this at a local garden center.
Two of the snowdrops that were dug up to avoid having them wiped out by the new gas line, which will be installed eventually, are under the “instant greenhouse” for better protection. The greenhouse cover has sort of been reinforced.
This is ‘John Gray’; you can see someone has nibbled on one of the petals.
And this is ‘Byfield Special’.
Both of these have been in the garden for some years but have never done much because they weren’t getting enough sun. They’re not completely open, of course, but I wanted to show how well they’re doing, despite being dug up in their growing season.

Graham Stuart Thomas, writing in Three Gardens, says this: “If they flowered at midsummer we should not accord much enthusiasm to snowdrops, but in the earliest months they are specially welcome, and a study of their leaf colours from grey to shining rich green, the vernation, and the flower variations provide a lot of interest.”

This is obviously true for the guy I live with.
Because our winters generally aren’t snowbound, he sometimes criticizes himself for trying to transplant the forms of Helleborus niger that flowered at this time of year (they all died), not planting winter-flowering heaths, and so on, but he most certainly does not criticize himself for planting Viburnum farreri years ago, named after Reginald Farrer, a favorite writer and “the father of modern rock gardening”.
It’s having a very good winter indeed, and, yes, this is the time for it to flower, if the winter isn’t too cold. The guy I live with says it’s hard to photograph.
You can see the bees flying around it even before you get close to it.  And you can smell it, too. It’s scented like heliotrope.

A week ago, when he wasn’t sure how cold it would get, he cut some flowering branches, got instructions on how to cut them for a vase, with water, because he has no experience with that, and here they are downstairs.
Also not a great picture. You can smell the flowers when you walk into the room.

After all of this, I’ll leave with you with a picture of me watching the guy I live with today, as he cut more twigs for the house, hoping for some snow tonight. (Rain would be nicer, but we sometimes try to be realistic.)

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 talk about willows, snowdrops, and me. You may remember me from such posts as “The Dog Star”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
This is me investigating something. I forget what it was. Maybe I saw a mouse; we have a lot of those in the garden.

Here I am again under the purple-leaved Prunus andersonii, looking at something again.
So tomorrow we have another “fire weather” warning.
The last few times we had wind it did dry out a lot of stuff, and the guy I live with says using a lot of native warm-season grasses can make the garden look pretty dry at this time of year, but he also pointed out that we had half again as much water from snow as the average precipitation for last month; on my evening walk he scratched the surface of the canal road and said it was damp an inch down.

This past December was the second-warmest in recorded history, which doesn’t really go back all that far. It’s not unusual to have temperatures of 64F (17.7C) at this time of year, but so many in a row is weird, and the fact that it’s only snowed three times is even weirder. He says “they” say we might get some snow at the end of next week.

The snowdrops certainly haven’t minded the warm temperatures.
The ones in the shade garden are flowering, though there are many more to come. The “header” shows how they’ll look in a few weeks.
These are some he dug up from the path in the shade garden; he said he needs to dig up more, because he keeps stepping on them.
These are extremely vigorous snowdrops and even though they don’t have a name maybe he likes these better because they grow like crazy.
This is Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus again.
Plicatus because you can see that the outer edges of the leaves are folded inwards (the guy I live with said it should really be “explicatus” to make it clearer); byzantinus because it grows near Istanbul (ancient Byzantium).
These would normally be flowering at this time of year anyway, even with a little snow on the ground.

And those are the snowdrops. Now I’m going to post three pictures of the willow at the end of the path that the guy I live with took over the last two weeks or so. Two were posted on Facebook but the last one wasn’t.
There’s a streetlight off to the right that illuminates the green belt, but in different ways, as you can see.
This is the same species of willow I saw on my walk in the park, but the guy I live with says this one is especially photogenic.

That’s all I have for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me under the arbor.

Until next time, then.