Whose Garden Is It, Anyway?

Years ago, when we lived in the Philippines, I turned the yard of a rental house into a tropical garden. We had about half an acre with a house that was small by US standards, walls already around the back and sides, and a lot of room for trees. The place already had a big mango tree, jackfruit, some enormous begonias, and a tree that grew some long, skinny vegetable they made soup with. I never did learn what it was called, so in my head it's still the vegetable tree. There was also a tree with fruit about the size of big grapes that were really good. I planted coconut trees that were already big and filled the rest of the place with everything I could get to grow. Basically every tropical plant you've ever seen in a pot at a store here, except the size they get when nobody keeps them in a pot.

Along the existing walls I built terraces and raised beds. I hadn't asked the landlord first. It was more of an ask-for-forgiveness-later arrangement, and by the time we'd finished transforming the place, people would come by just to look. We spent a lot of money on it, and I spent more time on it than I'd like to add up.

I loved every minute. I could figure out what a plant needed, fix the soil, move it into better light, prune it, or protect it from whatever was eating it. But I couldn't make it grow.

That part belonged to the plant.

I did what I could, and then I got to watch what happened. Some of the most peaceful moments of my life happened out there, completely absorbed in something I couldn't control.

Then there were the dogs. Buster and Turtle were Rottweilers, brother and sister, and I'd raised them from eight weeks old. Buster was about 120 pounds. Turtle was about 95, and she was the mean one with strangers. Buster didn't really care. Both of our kids had known them since birth. They were family, and they were also our security.

I'd designed the fencing so we could control which part of the property they guarded: the front of the house, the back where the kids were playing, wherever we needed them. They had a job, and the job was the perimeter. The perimeter, it turned out, was also where I'd put all the terraces.

They loved it up there. They'd climb into the raised beds, walk through whatever I'd just planted, churn up the soil, and flop down somewhere cool. It drove me fucking crazy. I put up bamboo barriers, but the bamboo couldn't go around the whole thing, so they went around the end. I blocked that route and they found another one. When they ran out of routes, they jumped over. This went on for a long time, and I wasn't shrugging it off. We'd put real money into those beds, and I was pissed.

We didn't hit our dogs. That's not how we trained them. But one day I caught Buster up on a terrace again, and it turned into something else. I went up after him, and he took off through the mud. I chased him, slipped, went down, grabbed him, and then the two of us were wrestling in the dirt, all 120 pounds of him, and I was spanking him. Somewhere in the middle of it, it hit me what a losing proposition this was. Not just the wrestling match, although I was losing that too.

Turtle sat at the edge of the terrace and watched the whole thing. She was laughing. I'm sure of it.

That's when I asked myself who the dumb one was here, me or the dogs.

Because I knew exactly why they were up there. I'd sent them. I built the fences that put them on that perimeter and gave them the job of guarding it, and the terraces were the coolest, shadiest ground on the whole line. They were tearing up my garden, sure. But they weren't trying to. They were working, and resting on the job in the best spots on the property. I was mud-wrestling a Rottweiler for using his own home. Whose garden was it, anyway?

It was their garden, too.

So I quit trying to keep them out and started designing for them. I'd already done so much of the planting and terrace work, so there was no reason I couldn't keep changing it around two Rottweilers. I made paths to the spots they liked, pulled planting back from where they slept, and worked around their favorite places instead of through them.

It worked, for a while. Then they found a new way to one of those spots, and the new route flattened something else, so I changed that. The change messed with how the water drained, so now the dogs were coming in muddy, so I dealt with the drainage, which changed what their new routes were doing to the ground.

That should've been miserable, and it was the opposite. Every time the dogs found a new route or a new place to lie down, they were showing me something about that yard I hadn't noticed, and I'd build from there. I wasn't fighting anybody anymore. I was working with a couple of very large collaborators who had strong opinions about shade.

The kids were doing the same thing. They played all over that garden, and I couldn't decide where the best hiding places were going to be any more than I could decide where Buster slept. So I watched. I'd see where they went and what they did there, and then I'd make that spot a little more interesting, or build a surprise into it, or try to lure them toward some corner they hadn't found yet. Then they'd do something with a part of the yard I never would've thought of, and I'd have something new to work with.

The garden I ended up with wasn't the one I'd drawn up in my head. It was better, and it was never finished. There were probably a hundred ways that yard could've turned out beautiful.

Then the sun would move. A spot that was perfect at one time of day was miserable later on, so Buster and Turtle would get up and go find a better one, and I'd go out to see what they'd come up with this time.

Ever lose a long fight over a space that turned out to be somebody else's, too? Tell me about it through the contact page.