LENTEN ROSES
One special Lenten Rose~straight talk about pets~in the month of March, farmer's market flowers
White Double Blooms Dappled with Rich Maroon
A staple that can brighten up a late winter garden . . . .
While wild flowers may be popping up now, while some flowering trees may even have come and gone, Lenten roses in your garden may well be among the first of this year’s colors. Our particular “Winter Jewel Painted Doubles” Lenten rose bloomed recently, revealing elegant burgundy speckles on bright-white petals.
The Lenten rose is not a rose; it belongs to the buttercup family. The name Lenten rose refers to the plant's bloom season, which is around the Christian season of Lent, March 2 through April 14, this year, and its cherished rose-like blooms that are usually two to three inches in diameter. They originated in the dry climates of Greece and Turkey and sport handsome leathery evergreen foliage, dark green leaves with sharply toothed edges. These early blooming beauties are known by many to be aristocrats in a garden.
The handsome Hellebores (Zones 4–9) are a varied group of shade-loving perennials admired by gardeners across the U.S. for their attractive foliage, exceptional resistance to deer, rabbits, and snails, plus their bloom period. Hellebores bloom in profusion from winter to spring. They have cuplike, nodding flowers—ranging from single to double. The large nodding flowers come in an exuberant range of colors from snow white to creamy white to a dusky plum to slate black and almost everything in between. Some of the newer hybrids even feature gorgeous variations in the form of spotting, veining, splashing, or edging in contrasting hues. The blooms on some of the older heirloom varieties are downward facing, but the newer hybrids have upward- and outward-facing blooms. As lovely as they are in the garden, hellebores also make excellent cut flowers and are intriguing additions to winter bouquets.
Bunnies & bearded dragons are for children . . . .
My wife, Sara, and I said we’d take care of the bearded dragon in our home when some neighbor kiddos got a new puppy. And we thought we’d return it after the family decided it could manage a small zoo quite nicely. Until then, they apparently didn’t think you can have both a bearded dragon and a dog, oh, in addition to the two bunnies they already had. We knew about that neighbor’s bunnies because we’d been pressed into occasional duty feeding them fresh kale and dried pellets while they were away for a weekend. It was during those feedings we realized that we couldn’t really be friends with bunnies. They don’t do anything. They just eat and wait to eat again. Friends say thanks somehow.
Understandably, when you go to a pet store and see adorable bunnies in all colors, their sweet faces whisper “please, please take me home.” And so it must also have been with a darling baby bearded dragon a mere couple inches long.
After getting the dragon to our home, it was not long before all you did is run to the pet store every couple days to buy crickets, three dozen at a time, come home, tear up some kale, too, and feed the little guy, now some 8 inches long. It ate the crickets live! While children may delight in just looking at diminutive pets such as bunnies and bearded dragons, all of a sudden we realized not only bunnies but baby dragons give virtually nothing back to their adult caregivers. They’re only high maintenance. While the bunnies were at least soft, the dragon wasn’t. From the very beginning of our relationship with the dragon, neither of us wanted to touch it. We were the furthest thing from dragon-lizard-snake-turtle-frog-scorpion-tarantula people. Not only are all those virtually untouchable, none is fun, none is smart. My reptile-person-sister insists, however, dragons do have emotions, want to be held, to be talked to, and want to run loose in the house. I’ve got serious doubts about all that. Our dragon just hung out in its "vivarium," a dragon-world word for aquarium or terrarium. Sometimes ours tried to climb the vivarium walls, bounced its body against the sides, made a racket, and, most annoying of all, quickly persuaded me it wasn't satisfied just confined, rather like a tiger in a zoo probably isn’t. I soon began to actively dislike this creature. I put a basket of pillows between my favorite TV chair and it so I wouldn't have to look at this creature. That did the trick for awhile, but, I could still hear a lot of fussing going on. By the time the cricket-shopping, the disgusting habits, endless annoying racket, and the thought why-are-we-keeping-this-thing? just wouldn't go away, we decided to do something. Since there was no way I could make friends with it, since the true owners refused to reclaim it, we decided the dragon had to go.
Getting rid of them is so common there’s an industry term for it . . . to “re-home" it. I called four pet stores. All said no. A turtle was just dropped off without explanation at the front door of the first one by someone who was apparently over it with that turtle. Only one unwanted creature at a time was that store’s limit. The other shops all advised us to try to find some online community of bleeding-heart reptile lovers in a big city where we lived to take it. We visited one such pet store. It was close by. And, at first, it hinted it was a real possibility. Eventually, not, though. On the way out of that store, I decided to tour this odd, rundown shop which claims to sell 10,000 crickets a month to reptile owners with voracious pets. That’s down from 18,000 a month before COVID. There was a slinky $3,000 long black snake there. Scorpions, turtles, one or more of the 1,000+ species of hairy tarantulas, frogs, Madagascar hissing cockroaches (what?), and baby golden boa constrictors.
Flash forward a couple days, in came a warning from my sister to get rid of the dragon soon so it wouldn’t go nuts before its next keeper wouldn’t be able to bring it back from the brink of insanity. With that bit of advice, we were off again.
On to the internet. I lucked out finding a website for supposedly the very first and largest reptile store in the U.S., founded in 1970 and only a half-hour away. What a place! This just had to be the new home for our dragon. Mothers and fathers brought toddlers in to show them reptiles bigger than their child, such as a "crocodile monitor" which can get up to eight feet long (male: $4,500; female: $5,000). And lots of smaller creatures, too. Not your taste? Anyone looking for Vietnamese centipedes?They've got every creature, large and small, that a reptile-and-more-lover could ever dream of. Gratefully, they took ours to be a "store pet," a pet to re-home, or a pet to sell. My sister, with her boundless admiration for ours, said it might be worth lots of money since it was a lovely specimen. We couldn’t care less. We just wanted it out of our home. For what it’s worth, the clerk there told us ours was probably a girl after a close examination of her nether regions. Practiced observers can’t really tell unless the creature is already a teen. I asked if I could write postcards to the teenager we just put up for adoption, if, say my wife and I missed her. The clerk, the master of the house where she would now reside, smiled sheepishly but never asked for her name.
On our way to the checkout, a nearby Mom asked: "Honey, you like that one?” pointing to one unbecoming dragon in a vivarium.
Her young daughter responded: "Oh, I do!”
The Mom: "You're so brave to say that."
The next move for the mom might well have been to buy a two-inch baby bearded dragon for her daughter for $125 and watch it grow into a worthless, teenage dragon that her reptile-loathing dad will, six months later, bring back here to re-home it after inevitably it becomes a relentlessly-mooching slothful squatter.
A puppy can be more than friends with anyone . . . .
January 16th was my birthday. Sara and I just happened to be dogsitting that day and went to a dog park to give our charge, a medium-sized cream-colored charmer, a day of running around. Our condo didn’t have a backyard. We had been to the same place the day before when he showed scant few signs wanting to be a real dog, to grow up, develop some confidence, be courageous, and run with burly dogs more substantial than he, rather than endlessly sniffing away at tiny, tiny, high-pitched sassy miniatures. Low and behold, right when we arrived that day, our puppy joined a pack of bruts. They ran. He chased them. He ran. They chased him. And so it went. Quite a leap from yesterday. I became engaged in conversation with another couple with a medium-sized black dog. It ran, too, but with a different crowd.
Well into our conversation about the woman’s professional life, I found myself knocked violently off my feet! I lay dazed on the ground with a throbbing left leg attached to the rest of my fully traumatized body! I’d been side-swiped from behind by a couple at-least-80-pound dogs chasing one another around the dog park galloping at least 150 miles per hour!
While our puppy was no certified EMT, of course, he was able to tap into the gene pool of his wolf ancestors almost instantly. He immediately went into guard dog mode. He stood over me the whole time I lay on the ground, threateningly barking away any and all dogs, whatever their size! I was in shock and also shocked by his bravery! I sure welcomed the protection. I learned later that such courage isn’t doled out willy-nilly. Only a canine’s favorite person in the whole world evokes such vicious-guard-dog response. I must have been his best friend! While my wife had spent much more time walking, feeding, and cooing over him, I seemed to be worthy of this rare protection, at least in my mind, a fact my wife, soon to be my primary caregiver for a couple months, deeply resented. But, I knew then this puppy and I were already fast friends.
I had to stop cooking because I lost my mobility. I got a cast first for my leg broken in three places. Then I got a boot. Weeks later, I thought, I would be able to take my boot off and be back to normal. I would be cooking again . . . prepping vegetables . . . fetching chicken from the frig . . . filling the sink with pots and pans from a big ravioli dinner. Even better, soon we would be moving to a house with a back yard, where the adorable puppy will be running solo, in our backyard giving us joy just watching him be himself.
Too funny! You should write for Saturday Night Live!
Hilarious! Our son Lige bought a huge lizard when he was 10. It fell off his shoulder and shed its tail. I don’t think Lige realized that you don’t cuddle with a big lizard. Anyway, we got rid of the critter , and I can’t remember how. We’re sticking with Lenten roses as our pets.