It’s a Dog’s Life: Garden Helpers

A lovely garden is the perfect summertime play park for canines and Teddy is inclined to agree, as Helen Stockton, his human translator explains 

May is a busy month, and one of its annual events is the Chelsea Flower Show. Regular furs are not allowed to attend, only assistance and guide dogs, but to be honest, I wouldn’t want to go anyway. There are crowds and then there’d be the weather and public transport to contend with. 

I’d much rather watch it on the TV from the comfort of my own bed. And myself and the apprentice will be keen viewers, as Monty Don, the presenter of Gardeners’ World, is doing a Chelsea dog garden. This is described as celebrating the connection between two of the nation’s biggest loves, dogs and gardening, and they do rather go together like cheese and pickle, strawberries and cream, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, if you’ll excuse the food analogies. 

Obviously, we dogs are a great help in the garden. We can do digging, watering, firming in, pest control, our skills are endless. In addition, I can do elegant draping, demonstrating where the sunlight falls at different times of day by following it round the garden. All essential skills. The apprentice, Bear, does a fine line in plant-pot theft and destruction. She also likes to take any small gardening tools and gloves, lying unattended, and run off with them. 

‘Her Indoors’ has, mysteriously, only got one gardening glove left. She doesn’t actually know what happened to the other one, but she has her suspicions. And it’s amazing just how much mess a small dog can make with a ball of gardening string. 

Anyway, ‘Her Indoors’ now has a special utility belt for gardening so that she can keep all the necessary items close to her person, which doesn’t entirely stop the apprentice, it just makes it more of a challenge. 

When we last went to stay with our holiday carers, ‘Her Indoors’ updated them with a long list of Bear’s potential misdemeanours but she forgot to mention Bear’s penchant for plant labels. Needless to say, all those carefully labelled pots and plants in our holiday carers’ garden were suitably anonymised by the time ‘Her Indoors’ returned to collect us. We like to think it made the garden more exciting as they didn’t know what was coming up, when and where. 

Anyway, if you’re reading this Monty, the perfect dog garden in our reckoning, has a lawn for chasing round on, trees for pee-mail, gravel or bark chippings to roll in, a fruit and veg garden for help yourself noms, and a water feature, preferably with running water, to drink from. 

A barbeque area would be nice as we dogs have a divine right to the last sausage, oh and some flowers, if you want...

That’s Monty’s gold medal sorted then!