GARDEN PAW DIPLOMACY - The challenge of gardening when cats are involved

Many people who love both cats and gardening have become wistful and wishful - they truly wish cats did not enjoy the gardening season quite so much. Some of them wonder if it is ever possible to garden in harmony with enthusiastic feline gardeners. The absolute answer emerging from the daunting truth, is of course - only sometimes. But "sometimes" is so much more a reason to party than "never". And some help is almost always better than none at all.

Life is full of compromises and Garden Paw Diplomacy certainly requires a compromise. A quiet, peaceful and yet stealthy style of negotiation, it involves using plants that cats truly dislike to avert their interest in some areas as well as using plants that they really like to focus their interest elsewhere.

Outdoor plants that a great many cats find contemptible - will very often include a surprising number of rather common plants. A list of such plants includes marigolds, allium, lavender and chamomile. A large number of felines also find pennyroyal, leeks, citrus( both the peels & the fruit inside) onions, garlic and rue to be rather repulsive.

To focus feline interest in a particular area, you can plant an appealing patch with napeta cataria (catnip) valeriana officinalis (garden heliotrope) napeta faassenii (cat mint) and teucrium marum (cat thyme). Many felines are also fond of actinidia polygrama (silver vine) and lonicera tatarica (honeysuckle).

During much of the growing season at Ellerslie Gift & Garden, we stock many of the cat repulsion and cat attraction plants mentioned above. If we don't always have all of them, we usually have some of them.