Landscaping with the terrier in mind

While I love pretty plantings and flowers as much as the next person, due to having limited time and a pack of wild terriers we've had to adopt a rule here: if it can't live through the dogs, it wasn't meant to live here.

I'm not saying I am okay with blatant destruction and I supervise the dogs in their outdoor play since I always try to keep potential diggers redirected.  But my mostly native PNW landscaping is pretty tough, needs very little time and water, and lives through the majority of the abuse dished out on it by the dogs.

Chima takes a shortcut through the day lilies and into the giant allium plantings 

In spite of that toughness though, my poor landscaping was not prepared for Chima and her love of plants. Maybe it was her time as a desert dweller and all the green here is pretty novel but unlike most dogs who are happy to just sniff a plant and then move onto something better, Chima  needs to fully experience the plant. She needs to stick her head into it for deep sniffs, then she needs to rub her body along it to see how that feels. If it feels good then she likes to fully wade into it and maybe even take a roll in it for a full experience.

And when she gets her 28 pounds hauling through the yard at full speed, if the plant is under 4 feet tall she goes through it and not around it.

Chima sniffing at her very favorite plant: lemon balm. She  will stand there for minutes  with her head in the plant, sniffing away

My poor Western Sword ferns, majestic mature 4' diameter masses of fronds, are looking a bit on the rough side. The big hardy fuchsia is doing wonderfully but the bleeding heart put on a beautiful show for a week and then was heartily trampled. The giant alliums are hanging in there but are tilted horizontally at this point and I don't know if the Yarrow will actually mature this year since it lies along one of her favorite paths. The junipers have taken their beatings well and her very favorite plant of all - a big clump of lemon balm - looks great. That's to be expected though since the stuff is impossible to kill.

After taking a questionable "shortcut" through a patch of 15' tall bamboo and over the top of a small woodpile, Chima jumps up on a table to inspect the Weber grill.

I try my best to bite my tongue and let her romp and play, occasionally attempting to move the game out onto the lawn. Since the other smaller dogs get overwhelmed by her exuberance she has to have something to play with and I think that her uninhibited joyful play is much more beautiful than the blooms she stampedes through.