Tales of Trial and Terror from the Garden

Good thing I'm an animal lover, or else I wouldn't put up with my puppy Duncan's energetic...uh, rearrangements of the plants growing in planters on the deck at the back of my house in West Hartford, Connecticut. 

Look what I'm forced to do to keep Duncan away from my Grandpa Ott morning glories:

The first several times he pulled the morning glories out of the pot, I tented it with these nice cotton towels from Portugal.

  But Duncan easily got his furry snout past those towels and continued to pull out the plants.  Next, I tried this arrangement:

The darn pot looks like it's getting married. 

I had a bolt of tulle in my stash, and once I planted a second batch of Grandpa Otts, I used some of that tulle to create this tent around the pot.   I inherited the bolt from the stash of Carolyn Soutter, a former member of my religious congregation, the Unitarian Society of Hartford http://ushartford.com/, who passed tragically and too early.

Carolyn was a fabulous quilter who masterminded and carried out the creation of this artful quilt celebrating the congregation's 150th anniversary in 1994:

Her daughters had first dibs at her stash, and once they'd had their picks, the rest was made available to the sewers in the congregation.  By "sewers," I mean not underground pipes that carry rain and pee, but rather persons who sit at sewing machines and sew.  We sewers were happy to have Carolyn's leftovers.  Her husband and daughters would probably be happy to know that I think of Carolyn whenever I use that bolt of tulle.  Probably none of them would have envisioned it in this setting:

I fastened the tulle down with a piece of elastic, also from my stash.  I knew it would come in handy one day. 

Fortunately, Grandpa Ott seedlings are not hard to come by.  Here, for example, is one saucily putting out its heart-shaped leaves in my silver garden, where it most definitely had not been planted:

Before he pulled up the Grandpa Otts out of the pot, forcing me to plant another batch today, Duncan chose to pull up and chew a lovely and pricey Centaurea Colchester White, which I'd ordered from White Flower Farm.  http://www.whiteflowerfarm.com/71210-product.html

Here's a look at that silvery plant as it would appear in the best of all possible worlds:

But back in MY world, where this plant was one of several in a pot on my deck, Duncan pulled it up and took it down into the yard and gnawed on it.  I took it away and splinted it, using a popsicle stick and cloth sticky tape, and replanted it.  He pulled it up again and turned it into such a stump that it might no longer hold any interest...except that it did.  So he pulled it up again, stump though it was.  And again.  And again.

Maybe it has an interesting smell.  Or maybe, because he once chewed on it, he could identify that fact by smell and knew it was "his" to dig up again.

The little brat.  I mean the... adorable little puppy.  Good thing he's so cute.