A Year in the Garden with Cats (and Dogs)

I’ve given myself permission to prioritize gardening for a year – or however long it takes to finish landscaping this 1-acre patch of paradise. Here’s the thing about gardening in Hawaii: Any scrap of space that isn’t covered in a thriving mix of desirable plants will quickly be consumed by waist-high weeds, and the only thing that makes me madder than having to pull the same weed twice is untangling a too-long hose. (But I digress. This rant is not about unruly hoses.)

You know how it is that once you make a decision and begin to move on with your plans, the Universe moves with you, offering assistance in a myriad of ways. I will tell you about the assistance I’ve been given, but I want to lay in some backstory first.

So. I’ve been moving lava rocks around to make new flowerbeds. First, I remove all the vegetation, down to the bare lava, which I cover with a layer of cardboard, followed by a good foot of mulch. Hans goes behind me and pours a six-inch-wide edge of mortar and rock to keep grass from creeping through the cracks and sending runners into the beds, and I do my best to fill the bed with plants and cuttings before too many weed seeds can drift in and take root.

All this activity in the yard has changed the landscape and generally (according to the cats) ruined everything. This came to a head the other night, when I took the dogs out for one last potty and kicked the cats out for the night. Bad weather was coming, and the cats weren’t happy with me for messing around with their chosen hiding places.

See, not every cat around here loves (or even tolerates) every other cat. So they’ve each claimed certain areas as theirs. Stella sleeps in the side garden or a cardboard box in the greenhouse, Princess Grace likes the potting shed, Blue takes the Cat Palace, Glenn will occupy any cardboard box he can find, Toby tries to hide on the front lanai so he doesn’t get tossed out at bedtime, and Robin doesn’t understand why he can’t sleep in the dog’s bedroom (because according to him, he is, in fact, a dog who just happens to look like a cat).

Stella and Glenn were especially pissed, because we had taken their cardboard boxes apart to line the bottom of the new flowerbeds. Oh, the infamy! As you can imagine, after I shut the door on all those furious furry faces, I got an earful that kept me awake long after I’d gone to bed. They weren’t fussing though. They were giving me so many landscaping ideas that I had to get up and write it all down in my journal, lest I forget. (This is the assistance I was referring to a few paragraphs ago.)

All the cats but Blue Kitten think that the Cat Palace is more of a hovel than a palace, and even Blue has ideas about the décor. He wants us to build a cathouse lean-to beside the house, because the Palace doesn’t feel safe in bad weather. I’m coming up with a plan to make a cathouse / storage cupboard where we tend to dump yard tools we don’t want to take all the way out to the greenhouse. Toby wants us to attach a series of stepping shelves down the exterior wall so he can enter and exit the front lanai from the outside. Stella and Glenn want their boxes back. I’m on it, except for the fact that Robin still wants to be a dog, and I can’t do anything about that.

But anyhow, aside from landscaping ideas, the cats are giving me other ideas, like about documenting how my gardening decisions are being guided by our animals. I did wrong, and their assistance in making it right could make a good-enough story to tell. We’ll see how it goes, but the cats and I are excited about our new landscaping cooperative efforts.

Even Kailani is helping, by showing me all the areas where she can still jump the secondary fence I installed to keep her from chasing up and down the road and trample all the puny, easily bullied plants that I wanted to grow there. I didn’t intend to plant so many huge thorny bromeliads, but she made me do it, and luckily, my neighbors have been eager to give me truckloads of their discarded bromeliad overgrowth. (You have to keep on top of those things or they’ll take over.)

Now, as I spread another layer of ointment on all the cuts and bruises that I got from moving those big heavy thorny things, I must admit that the front garden Kailani forced me to build looks much better than my original plan. The curvilinear bright orange thread that weaves through the garden is prettier than all the wimpy plants I wanted to put there. And I don’t think the weeds will dare to infiltrate that impenetrable orange barrier, but if they do, I’m sure the cats (or Kailani) will have an idea of what to do about it.