the bristlecones

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the somewhat damp purebred border collie, here today to tell you about the news of the last twenty-four hours. You may remember me from such posts as “Some Spring Stuff”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose, waiting for a biscuit.
You may be able to tell what happened here this morning.
It isn’t supposed to freeze tonight, so this is no big deal, according to the guy I live with.

Before I get to the news, which the snow is part of, I should show some of the plants that were in flower yesterday. They’re still in flower, but covered with snow now.
This is the lilac, ‘Annabel’. It’s the first lilac to flower here, and is rarely nipped by frost, unlike the common purple types.
The guy I live with has decided not to remove all the lilacs; he said it would be too much work.
This is Fritillaria pallidiflora:
This is Fritillaria oliveri. You can see progeny at the base of the plant behind it.
Cyclamen pseudibericum flowers later than the other cyclamen here.

Okay, so now I have a little story to tell. This involves me, so there will be added interest.
Way back when, the guy I live with and his wife used to have this agreement, that if they saw something special that one of them wanted, they should buy it. Like a book or a CD or a Christmas ornament. Not to mention purebred border collie puppies.

After his wife died, he made a last visit to Jerry Morris’s nursery. He bought some conifers, and noticed a little row of maybe four dwarf intermountain bristlecone pines, Pinus longaeva.
These are fairly similar to the bristlecone that’s from the mountains here, Pinus aristata, but don’t have the “leaky needles” as Jerry described them. (I’ve showed a picture of the dwarf Colorado bristlecone that he got from Jerry.) The needles do have some resin “leaking” from them, but not as much as the bristlecone of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona; both species grow in subalpine and alpine regions.

For some reason, the guy I live with didn’t get any of these little pines, grafted from witches’ brooms.
He has regretted this ever since then.

Yesterday there was a big plant sale at the county fairgrounds. The guy I live with told me he wouldn’t stay very long, and would try not to buy very many plants.
The forecast, believe it or not, called for rain. The sale took place in the evening.
The guy I live with rarely leaves me alone in the evening, and so he gave me some Rescue Remedy on a biscuit, just in case.

He wasn’t at the plant sale for very long. After the landmine business, he had signed up for alerts from the county, and his phone went off as he was driving home. There was lots of thunder and lightning.
When he stopped at a red light, he looked at his phone, and there was a severe thunderstorm warning, right where he was sitting in his car.

It started to hail on our new car. Fortunately the hail was only pea-sized, and he was less than twenty blocks from home.
When he got home, he saw that it had hailed here, and apologized profusely for abandoning me. I was okay, but decided to play it pretty pathetically.

Eventually he brought out the plants he bought; conifers propagated by Laporte Avenue Nursery. They propagate several of Jerry’s conifers, mostly named varieties, but at least one that isn’t named.
There’s a Pinus flexilis ‘Saunny’, named after Jerry Morris’s wife, and two dwarf Pinus longaeva. The guy I live with said he thought Jerry never gave these a name. Even if these aren’t the same as the ones he saw at the nursery, all those years ago, they’re good enough.
I could tell he was very happy with these pines. He said he was going to “coddle the daylights out of them”.

The pines can live happily in pots; their roots can tolerate a great deal of cold. (The roots of Pinus flexilis, for instance, are hardy down to -79F, -61.6C, so living in pots here isn’t an issue at all. The guy I live with said he can’t imagine cold like that.)

And that’s our little story.

This morning, the guy I live with was a bit concerned that I might not want to go on my morning walk, considering the possibility of thunder, but by the time we were ready for our walk, it was snowing. It can still thunder when it snows, but it didn’t, this time.
(The snow has mostly melted now, and it’s just raining.)

Water in the creek was flowing really fast. Maybe all the sand will have been washed down the creek after all of this.
I’ll let you go now, with some pictures of the creek, and best of all, pictures of me.

Until next time, then.

annoying things

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you up to date on news from the garden. You may remember me from such posts as “Day Of The Scorpiris”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically sun-drenched pose.
They say we may get some rain this weekend, which will be nice because April has been so dry.
It snowed again a few days ago, which is why I didn’t post then. It didn’t freeze the night it snowed, and the snow was all gone by the end of the next day.

There are plants in flower, which may not come as much of a surprise.
This is a groundcover-type manzanita. It’s been in the front yard for many years and has never been watered.
The guy I live with says it may be heavy-handed of me to show a picture of the apple tree next, since “manzanita” is Spanish for “little apple” (referring to the fruit), but this is a regular apple tree and no relation to species in the genus Arctostaphylos, which are related to rhododendrons, blueberries, heathers, and plants like that.
Anyway, the apple tree.
The apple tree was the first thing planted here. There was a row of them in the back yard; they all died but this one. The guy I live with said he should have taken that as a sign.

The juno irises are flowering, though not as spectacularly as in some years, because it’s been so dry. Junos are in the Subgenus Scorpiris, and some botanists place them in their own genus, Juno.
There are a lot of species and the guy I live with said he wants them all, except for one which isn’t hardy because it grows on, like, Sicily or some place like that.
They’re mostly not at all easy to acquire.

We worked in the garden today, even though there was an annoying, nasty chemical smell from next door. The guy I live with got a sore throat.
But the most annoying thing, and I could tell that this was super annoying by the language used, was the amount of effort digging out roots of this plant he bought at a plant sale some years ago.
The roots are thick as a pencil and they go down deep into the ground. The plant spread everywhere and the guy I live with gets mad just looking at the new shoots.
The guy I live with said this has happened before, and more than once; planting something that immediately displayed a tendency to take over the whole garden.
He dug and dug and dug, and got at least a few of the roots. He said this thing is even worse than smooth brome, which is saying something, believe me.
You can see some junos in the background there.
The cages are for crocuses, so that bunnies won’t mow down the leaves.
This will all have to be redone, with a new gravel mulch.

So that’s our news for today. I’ll leave you with a picture of me lying on the couch, listening to a lecture about me “beflortling” the couch. He says the word “beflortle” means to totally rearrange something that was all arranged before, but I think it’s a made-up word.

Until next time, then.