Garden view Helen Billiald gets a bouncy new spaniel
Can a garden ever recover from a bouncy new spaniel? Helen Billiald finds out the hard way
Change has come to our garden. It’s an alteration so far reaching, no leaf has been safe from the shockwaves. We got a puppy! This wasn’t an unplanned event. I grew up with dogs and have spent years longing for some company in the garden and a snoring rug of fur under the desk as I write. I’d watched with envy how smoothly Nigel and Nellie slotted into gardening life on Gardeners’ World, and I’d nagged my family mercilessly. At last, this spring, a small red and white bundle of spaniel joy arrived. It might have been gentler to swing a two-tonne wrecking ball into the garden. I spent hours out there, but very few minutes actually gardening. Most of my time was spent noticing what I should be doing while waiting for Rosie to do her business. (I’ve seen more 2am star-filled skies in recent months than I did in all my student years.)
The trials of teething
Readers expecting detailed reviews of my 2018 vegetable cultivars may be disappointed because before I’d clocked what was going on, Rosie managed to systematically remove and chew every white plant label she could find. Sowings are recorded in notebooks but if you’re trialling four different pak choi cultivars, that really doesn’t help. Teething lasts for ages; time enough for her to discover the puppy-height stepover apples in their first year of training, the young hornbeam hedge and almost-ripe sweetcorn. The role of Rosie’s own hind legs as a support system for her bottom seems beyond her. In the greenhouse she’d flop down on salad plants, be moved on by me and flop down again, this time snapping a tomato plant, then tumble backwards at my cry of horror and break another. Slapstick may be her vocation. If she’s in the walled garden when peak excitement hits I cover my eyes and wait for the crashing to stop. ‘Four-pawdrive’ has considerable grunt, and if the brassicas, with their hoops and insect mesh, lie in her path, Rosie simply trampolines over the top. Me moving a hoe through the soil is accompanied by much leaping, growling and digging. So, I don’t do much hoeing in her presence. In fact very little gardening happens when she’s around. I can’t plant out anything that isn’t pulled out, sat on or chewed. The safest activity is clearing away old crops, but she’ll still capsize a wheelbarrow in her hunt for the perfect chewing stick hidden at the bottom. The idea of her snoring quietly at my feet while I write remains a hilarious pipedream. Cables, book shelves and indeed desk legs are far too tempting for sore gums and new teeth. Turn your back for a nanosecond and her mouth is clamped around the end of the armchair with that wide-eyed look of, “Who me?” Writing longhand at my garden picnic bench requires nerves of steel and the complete absence of mugs of tea. Our energetic pup is wont to take a running jump onto the table top, sending everything flying in one bound. I know we’re in the depths of her troublesome ‘teenage’ years and all this will pass. I’ll admit it’s a joy to spend hours outside just ‘being’ rather than perennially with my head down on a gardening job. But I’m also so very glad that there’s no one around to photograph my garden chaos right now.
Helen Billiald is a garden writer with a PhD in Ecology and an MSc in Pest Management
I cover my eyes and wait for the crashing to stop