Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to start the new year off with a morality tale, or something close to it. You may remember me from such posts as “A Chilly Interlude”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. I’m waiting for the guy I live with to come out and work in the garden.
The guy I live with said he might consider cutting down all the grasses, because it makes the garden look browner than it really is, but then some people say to leave everything so that insects have shelter for eggcases and things like that. Cutting down grasses is work, even with the very sharp Japanese grass sickle.

Geranium macrorrhizum is still very green under the snow. Last winter it was completely defoliated by the cold, which the guy I live with said he had never seen before.
And here’s Lilium candidum. The leaves stay more or less green all winter. This is one you plant very shallowly in early autumn, so it can do this.
And Genista villarsii, a dwarf broom. This has been here for years.
Satureja spinosa, grown from seeds and planted out last year, I think. This is from Crete.
Heuchera ‘Chiqui’, a pink coralbells which has been here for many years.
And this is not to mention all the cyclamen, conifers, and so on.

Well, so, the guy I live with has been thinking about ordering some bulbs from overseas again, despite the fact that his last order, from England, never showed up, and it involved kind of a lot of money.
He still wanted some crocuses, and more snowdrops (there’s a place in England that takes care of all the necessary permits), and he looked through the catalogs and wondered what he was doing, wanting all these plants.
He thought about buying a hundred or so “bulk” Galanthus elwesii a couple of months ago but then realized, like he didn’t know already, that there are more of these snowdrops in the garden here than in most gardens in this country.

He’d been involved in rock gardening for years, and one of the typical attributes was wanting plants, Want, want, want. Especially rare plants that are difficult to grow.
Now most of those plants are long dead, and he thought about this for a while today. All the wanting, all the money spent ultimately for nothing, and he thought he might actually be happier wanting less.

So, and even though he’s still planning to order some bulbs later this year, he decided it was time to let go of a lot of this desire.

He said “Let’s go out and do some work.” I was all for that, though I don’t do much actual work. It’s more like supervising.

On the way out to “The Enclosure” he took a picture of the buds on Viburnum farreri. They could be open later this month, depending on the weather, of course.

And then look what happened.
All the broken trellises at the top of the fence were removed, and all the cedar boards from the panel on the left were removed. The boards were put in the shed.

The guy I live with dug the postholes; his wife built the fence. He felt very strange dismantling the fence, but he said there are so many other memories of her, in the house, the garden, the shed, the arbors, and so on, that it was time for him to let go of this, and make a commitment to rebuilding the fence, as I said in my last post.
In other words, rebuilding the fence, instead of just looking at the broken fence and heaving a sigh, because his wife loved the little space she made for herself in that garden.

The crossarm (you can see the dado his wife cut into the 4×4 in the picture above) was all rotted and the guy I live with was worried the whole panel might fall on me, so that’s why this work was begun today.
The rotting is due to the fairly regular watering this little garden gets. That, and squirrels constantly gnawing on the wood. The wood could have been painted but the guy I live with and his wife were against that.

Now, you can’t see that the fence on the western side of the enclosure slants to the south, because the trellis on top has been removed. You can’t see the western side of the fence at all; just the fence the guy I live with put up some years ago. (The one section on the right does slant a little because it’s not permanently attached to the other section.)
And if all that brown stuff were cut down, the garden might look less brown. (That’s some kind of mathematical thing, I guess. Or maybe it’s a logical proposition of some kind.)

That was my day. A lot better than yesterday, with firecrackers going off when I was on my evening walk, and then for hours, around midnight.
I’ll leave you with a picture doing one of my favorite things, standing halfway out of the door. Hopefully the heat wasn’t on while I was doing this.

Until next time, then.