By Laura Christman
Scripps Howard News Service
A friend of mine loves to garden. I like to garden, too. But the two of us have completely different approaches and visions.
Which is a problem, since we happen to garden in the same yard.
Actually, the real problem is that she is a dog — a 7-month-old flat-coated retriever determined to reshape our landscape.
She approaches the task with great energy and enthusiasm.
I believe she has some sort of lunar theme in mind. She has dug holes, uprooted entire plants, crushed tender shoots and snapped off branches. The other day I found her gnawing the trunk of an oak tree (no challenge is too big).
She does it all with glee. Frequently I come home to find her proudly standing at the sliding glass door with another piece of our drip system in her mouth.
This is not good. At some point we will have to turn on the water. I fear that we will discover that our irrigation system has been transformed into a water feature with water spurting, spraying and gurgling in a variety of interesting new directions.
What were we thinking? It as if we have invited a 47-pound gopher to live with the family.
It began innocently enough. When Kanaka came home with us in October, she was a cute, fluffy, sweet puppy. But she soon morphed into a large, black beast with sturdy jaws and rototiller claws.
She is happy to work alone or as a part of a gardening team. When I go out to weed, she springs into action, too — tearing out plants beside me. Unfortunately, her weeding lacks discretion. I turn around to see her bouncing across the lawn with a carpet bugle plant in her mouth, its long white roots (which, I might add, took a good three years to develop) trailing behind her.
Oh well.
I guess I should be really angry about this wanton destruction, but I'm a sucker for a wagging tail. The way I see it is that every garden has its challenges.
What would gardening be without obstacles?
Let's be honest, we gardeners take sort of a certain perverse joy in our woes. We wear our searing summers and lousy soil like badges of honor. Gardening wouldn't be nearly as much fun if we couldn't whine a bit about asphalt-hard red clay or a 115-degree day.
Gardening is about not giving up. It's about enjoying successes and learning from failures. It's about trying.
My family's garden will never be one of the great gardens. It's never going to look like it should be in a book (unless it's a book on blight). But it will be ours.
And it will have a big happy dog right in the middle of it.
(Contact Laura Christman of the Redding Record Searchlight in California at www.redding.com.)
