erica's garden: A dog's life

First of all, two pics this week from my life (there'll be a view from someone else's in a moment): one taken on a walk from work along the Grand Canal, where the yellow flags are signalling summer. It was a fine evening when I took the photo and the Dublin brick houses along the canal were warmly lit by an evening sun. The second photo is this year's Alchemilla mollis pic: every year should have one I reckon. Sometimes it's an on April morning or sometimes it's in May when the dew, the sunlight and the leaves of the Lady's Mantle (the common name for Alchemilla) conspire to create a moment of beauty.

Yellow flag irises along the Grand Canal

Beaded mantle

You know, there's a lot of philosophising in the gardeny-bloggy world about what a garden is or should be: a haven for wildlife in an increasingly habitat-hostile world; a productive plot, bursting with fruit and veg, the airmiles on your own food down to nothing; a room outdoors (aarrghh, a pet hate of mine to be honest); a carefully wrought landscape architect's creation, where everything has its place and the plants' job is simply to show off or soften the hard structures; a canvas for the sure touch of a master designer, where drifts of plants weave a wonderful tapestry of colour and texture through place and time; or a plant collector's catalogue (in some cases read 'mish-mash') of one plant type or many. These are things I think about too, when I have time, but to be honest, I got a bit tired this week of designers writing at length about what designed gardens should be, and whether they themselves should Dare (gasp!) to publish photos of their own garden, which might just fall short of the ideal. And so on (and, sometimes, on). But really, the plants and animals in our gardens will just get on with it, unconcerned with human angst about motivation and creation.

So I'm just going to get a little silly this week...

I was thinking today of those with whom I share the garden (because for me, gardens are best when they're shared): one brilliant photographer of course, a wonderful son (or two, when my other son is home from afar), friends of all of us, lots of different birds and insects and amphibians, and ... one schnauzer.

So I thought, forget the human motivation, forget the pride/shame about the tiny patch of garden, instead I decided to consider what my garden must look like from a schnauzer's point of view :-) ... Why not!?

And so here it is. There's a pic from above at first, where those of you who don't know the garden can see just how tiny it is (!).

A sort of aerial view of my small garden, damaged pond and all...

And the rest of the photos are taken from a small dog's point of view, where it looks way more interesting. Mind you, being a schnauzer, it's common scents that Izzy's after, and I've no doubt her favourite time in the garden is a damp morning when a fox or two has been by, or some cats; when the wood pigeons and other birds have been loitering around the bird feeder; when the frogs have made their wet way through the undergrowth ... The aesthetics and the fretting she leaves to us humans.