A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely deserve to be called a garden at all … much of the magic of the heather beds would vanish if, as we bent over them, there was no chance that we might hear a faint rustle among the blossoms, and find ourselves staring into a pair of sleepy, green eyes.”
—BEVERLY NICHOLS, A Garden Open Tomorrow, 1968
When we moved into our house, we had two cats with us, LeRoy and Gray-Baby. We kept them inside for nearly a week after we unpacked. I had read somewhere that cats orient themselves by the sun, memorizing the particular slant of light that means home. I left the curtains open and let them go from window to window, taking it all in: the ocean, the river, the weedy garden, the slightly too-busy street in front of us. By the time they went outside, they knew right where they belonged. They’ve never strayed far.
LeRoy marked out his territory right away, claiming our entire yard and most of Charlie’s. He was a young, wild thing who came to me and Scott in graduate school, after our next-door neighbor Sara gave up on him. “He’s a devilcat,” she said, handing him over to us. LeRoy was less than half-grown at the time, with brownish-gray tabby markings and four white paws. How bad could he be?
“You just don’t know cats,” we said to Sara. “You’re a dog person. He’ll be fine with us.” Years later, when Sara came to visit us in Santa Cruz, she let it slip that LeRoy had sprayed her down feather bed. “You can’t clean goose down, you know,” she said, clearly still irritated.
“He did what?” I asked, shocked. “You didn’t tell us that when you gave him to us.”
“Oh … didn’t I? I’m pretty sure I did,” she said distractedly, bending down to scratch LeRoy behind the ears.
Sara was right about LeRoy, though. He was a devilcat. He had a streak of wild desperation in him that never faded and that we’ve never been able to explain. During the first few nights we had him, back in Austin, he ran laps through our apartment, beginning at the front door, dashing through the kitchen, into our bedroom, across our bed, often using our pillows as a springboard to launch himself into the bathroom, and back to the front door. I never saw a creature with so much reckless energy. Finally Scott came up with the idea of putting a piece of tape on his tail before we went to bed. He would chase his tail, trying to grab the tape, until he finally fell down from dizziness and exhaustion and went to sleep.
As he grew up, he took to sleeping under the covers, nestled down between the two of us, his head on the pillow. If one of us rolled over in the night, he would stretch out a paw and rest it lightly against us, as if to keep us from moving too far away. It was such a sweet and intimate gesture that it made us forgive him for his wild behavior. In the middle of the night, I would reach over to pet him, and he would awaken and start to purr, then in a minute Scott’s hand would find mine on his warm flank, and we would fall back to sleep, connected through our errant cat. He’s a couple’s cat, we decided. A lover. But by day, he was still a foolish, headstrong fighter, taking on dogs, skunks, raccoons, and cats far bigger and more cunning than he. He always lost and came home sore and wounded and emotionally broken. It took a long night curled up between the two of us for him to be comforted enough to go fight his strange, useless battles again.
He has paid a price for these fights. He wears his battle scars visibly—torn ears, a bent tail, a scarred nose—and rather than make him look tough, they undermine what little dignity he has. Once he got sprayed by a skunk and came home after midnight, stinking and trying to crawl into bed with us.
When he lived with Scott in Eureka, he got into a fight with a dog. The dog snapped the tip of his femur off, and Scott, who was broke at the time, had to think twice about paying five hundred dollars for hip surgery so LeRoy could get patched up and sent back out into battle. But LeRoy won out, of course, and Scott handed over his credit card, reluctantly, shaking his head over the absurdity of it. The vet saved the little piece of broken-off bone and gave it to Scott in an orange prescription bottle, which Scott rattled at LeRoy when he misbehaved, as if to say, watch out or you won’t be so lucky next time.
When we first let the cats outside in Santa Cruz, LeRoy bounded around the yard like a kitten, although he was already five years old, well into adulthood. He chased birds and butterflies, he stuck curious paws down into gopher holes. He caught nothing. Within a few days, he had decided that the yard was his. Whenever I went outside, he acted astounded that I had decided to join him in his world. He scampered up the orange tree and watched me through the branches, his tail waving wildly. He came up behind me when I was down on the ground pulling weeds and put his paws on my shoulders, as if to say, Here I am. Were you looking for me?
GRAY WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF LEROY, and she made it known through her disdain of him. Where he was young and reckless, she was old and wise. Where he was clumsy, she was graceful. Where he begged for our attention, howling and whining and clawing the carpet when we ignored him, Gray sat quietly by, regal as a queen, until we noticed her by her dignified silence alone.
She has been with me since she was a kitten and I was in the third grade. She was my constant companion, waiting in the driveway for me to come home from school, sleeping on my pillow with her head next to mine, following me from room to room, calling after me in her scratchy voice. She anxiously watched me grow up, like a small whiskered mother, circling my bed at night before she jumped into it, her worried eyes following me as I left in the mornings, as if she wasn’t sure it was such a good idea to let me out of the house. I thought she would always look after me like that. I never thought about seeing her through old age, becoming the one who would someday take care of her, but of course that is exactly what happened.
She was seventeen years old when we moved to Santa Cruz. I never thought that she would live long enough to travel with me from Arlington, where I grew up, to my college apartment in Austin, and finally to California, where the fishy sea air and the cry of the seagulls would make her nose twitch and her ears perk up like a young cat. For someone who had lived most of her life in a suburban Texas backyard, California must have seemed like a foreign country. But she adapted as best she could. After all, as long as she was with me, she was home. She even started to follow me outside on the warmest, calmest days, when she could sun herself on the back porch and watch me warily through half-opened eyes.
In her younger days, Gray was a skilled hunter who left headless mice on the doorstep almost every morning in the summer. If she’d been just a few years younger, she might have taken an interest in the birds that were finding their way into my garden; instead, that task fell to LeRoy, who was much less experienced and less cunning. Still, I knew he was up to something one day in early spring when I saw him sitting under the lemon tree, his tail whipping around madly, his eyes focused on the leafy canopy above him. After a few days, I saw what he’d been looking at: a pair of mockingbirds who were building a nest in the higher branches. Every morning for a couple of weeks I got out of the shower, wiped the steam off the bathroom window, and peered out at them, watching them hop around the garden, pick up twigs, and take turns flying back and forth to the nest. All the while, LeRoy watched and learned.
THE MOCKINGBIRDS STAYED CLOSE to the nest or hopped around it, watching LeRoy with a wary eye, charging at any other bird who came near. They established a nofly zone above our yard. If they spotted a seagull gliding high above the house toward the ocean, they would hop to the roof and screech up at it, scolding it for coming anywhere near their lemon tree.
I worried about those birds. LeRoy seemed obsessed with them, circling the base of the lemon tree, scaring the mockingbirds so bad that they would flutter out of the tree in alarm. But he hadn’t tried to go after them, and I’d never seen him kill a bird before, so I watched him only halfseriously, calling out my admonishments from the back porch: “LeRoy, it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
Then one day in March, I heard the birds shrieking at him, and turned just in time to see him try to climb the tree. I rushed to the tree and pulled him down from the branches, glancing up at the nest as I did. It was barely six feet off the ground. I could have reached up and pulled it down myself.
I took LeRoy inside and dumped him on Scott’s lap. “He tried to go after the birds,” I told him, my voice breaking. “What are we going to do? We can’t keep him inside until the eggs hatch.”
“I don’t know …” Scott said, stroking LeRoy absently. He got up and went out to the garage, looking for ideas. I followed behind him. After a few minutes of rummaging around, we decided to build some sort of chicken wire fence around the base of the tree. There was only one main branch leading to the nest anyway, so we figured that if we could cut him off from half the tree, we might be able to keep him out of the nest.
I know it must have terrified the birds to see us get so close to their nest, but we worked quickly, and within fifteen minutes we had laced the lower branches of the tree with chicken wire. LeRoy didn’t go near the tree again that day, but we had to watch over him for a few days to make sure he couldn’t get past the chicken wire. I was starting to act like the mockingbirds, hovering around nervously, always keeping one suspicious eye on the cat.
FINALLY, ONE MORNING A FEW WEEKS LATER, I stepped outside and heard baby birds. It was a creaky little sound, like a door with rusty hinges opening and closing. I couldn’t see the babies from the window, but I saw the parents working like mad to feed them, rushing to the ground and back up to the nest, taking turns bending over them. I knew that having me nearby would only make them nervous, but I couldn’t resist trying to see the babies. I tiptoed out into the garden and stood on the other side of the lemon tree from the nest, straining to see it through the branches. Both of the adult birds froze in place, watching me with their sharp black eyes, not moving from their perch near the nest.
After a few minutes, the parents got used to me being there and one of them flew to the ground and back up to the nest with something in its beak. All at once, three tiny heads shot up, their necks bent back, their beaks open wide. The bird dipped its head into each of their beaks, then all three babies disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.
The baby birds grew fast. They cheeped almost constantly at their parents, and if a mockingbird can look worn out, these two did. They stopped worrying about LeRoy or about me and Scott tiptoeing over and peeking into the nest from our vantage point on the other side of the tree. It took all of their energy to watch over their three fledglings. They reminded me of the mother in that old Calgon commercial, who is so worn out by the kids and the housework and the phone ringing that she finally locks the bathroom door and sinks into a tub of bubbles, sighing, “Calgon, take me away.”
I KNEW THE BABY MOCKINGBIRDS had left their nest when I came home one day and didn’t hear their usual cheeping in the backyard. Sure enough, the nest was empty, but the babies were sticking close to home. I saw them, miniature versions of their parents, hopping along the top of the fence, following their parents everywhere and doing their best to imitate their songs.
But my heart sank when I realized that I saw only two of them. I started to look around the backyard, stepping carefully, pulling up clumps of weeds and pulling apart newly planted ground cover. It only took me a few minutes to find a baby bird corpse, half-eaten and cast aside under the lemon tree.
I knew a woman named Jean, who had lost a pet bird. This bird had lived with her for years. It talked to her, whistled at her, did tricks, and perched on her bedpost to watch over her when she took a nap. She left the bird in her boyfriend’s care one weekend when she went out of town. He had a cat, but he promised to keep the cat locked in the front part of the apartment and the bird—in its cage—locked in the bathroom.
But of course, the inevitable happened. He came home on Sunday to find the bathroom littered with bright green and yellow feathers.
It took Jean a while to get over the loss of her bird. But she never could stand to look at her boyfriend’s cat again. “I just couldn’t be around the cat, knowing that my bird was inside him. It would have been like living with a murderer. You know, he threw up the day after he ate the bird, and I was there when he did it. I kept wondering, ‘Is that my bird he’s throwing up?’”
I knew how she felt. When LeRoy crawled into bed with me at night, I was convinced he had blood and feather on his breath. I couldn’t sleep with him for a week, the little murderer. It was a long time before I could look at him without seeing that dead baby bird.
WE DIDN’T HAVE BIRDS NESTING in the garden again after that. I felt terrible about it; that lemon tree had probably been a nesting site for years. The birds hopped along the fence, looking out for LeRoy, and they only descended into the garden early in the morning, before I let him outside for the day. Over time, I grew accustomed to their quick, rustling departure when I opened the back door in the morning, the sound of air moving and creatures winging vigorously upward, as if the whole garden were flying off.
There seems to be no easy answer to this problem of the cats and birds in the garden. I tried putting bells on the cats, but they voiced their objection by keeping the bells perfectly silent out in the garden, until bedtime, when they crawled into my bed and jingled softly all night long. I have hung bird feeders in high, difficult-to-reach places, where I hoped the birds could land safely out of the cats’ reach. And I’ve often wondered how it is that a cat like LeRoy—a cat with little skill, too many distractions, and foolish pride—could outsmart the quick young sparrows along the fence, much less the scrappy mockingbirds. Once I saw LeRoy running to a shady corner of the garden with something in his mouth, and when I dashed out to intercept his path, I could not believe what I saw in his mouth: a bright blue hummingbird. I grabbed him, roughly, by the scruff of his neck, and his mouth fell open and the bird darted off, unharmed. I was disgusted with LeRoy, but I was a little disappointed in the hummingbird as well. How could such a keen, bright creature get outfoxed by my witless tabby?
The problems with the birds didn’t stop me from letting the cats explore my garden. They had been confined to patios and decks for too many years. I was glad that LeRoy had trees to climb, shrubs to hide under, places to explore. Even though Gray didn’t go outside much, she found a warm, sunny perch in the backyard, away from the noise and the traffic. I thought that maybe if I planted some catnip I could even entice her to walk around the garden a little bit. Besides, LeRoy loved catnip, and although I still held a grudge for his attacks on the birds, it was time for me to make peace with him.
I found catnip at the nursery in one-gallon containers, full-grown and ready to send the cats into fits of ecstasy. It was on sale, along with some chamomile plants, which were already covered in tiny white flowers with yellow centers. “Steep the chamomile flowers in hot water with a few catnip leaves for a soothing herbal tea,” the hand-lettered sign read. Chamomile and catnip tea? That sounded so California, so holistic, so organic. I took one of each plant, and their cheery flowers mingled with each other in my shopping cart as if they were already growing next to each other in the yard.
When I got home, I left the catnip outside on the porch and brought one leaf inside. Both cats jumped to their feet, LeRoy alert and aggressive, Gray shaky and surprised. They followed me around the living room, meowing loudly, until I broke the leaf in two and gave them each half. Gray curled herself around hers and buried her face in it, making small snorting sounds like nothing I’d ever heard from her before. LeRoy ate his out of the palm of my hand, grazing my skin with his teeth, drooling into my palm, grabbing my hand with his paw when I tried to pull it away. I’d clearly found the right stuff. I locked them in the house while I went outside to plant it.
I put the catnip in the back corner of the yard, where I hoped the cats wouldn’t notice it for a while. I should have known better, though—when I turned around and looked back at the house, I saw LeRoy sitting in a window, thumping his tail against the glass, watching me with wild desire in his eyes. I dug a hole big enough to hold the roots of the plant as well as the base of a chicken wire cage I’d fashioned from a small section of the roll we’d used to fence off the lemon tree. I anchored the cage around the plant, buried the base of it in the soil along with the roots, and fluffed the plant out, allowing a few shoots to poke through the chicken wire. I hoped that would keep the cats away until the plant got a little bigger. I made the cats wait while I planted the chamomile as well, and before I let them out, I picked chamomile flowers and catnip leaves for my tea.
LeRoy bounded over to the plant, and Gray ambled slowly behind, choosing each step carefully, catching up to him after he’d managed to eat most of the leaves sticking through the chicken wire. Gray gave him a low, impatient hiss, as if to say, Didn’t anyone ever teach you to respect your elders? LeRoy backed off long enough for her to come up and nibble a few leaves herself.
I don’t quite understand the effect that catnip has on cats. I have heard that it is, paradoxically, both a stimulant and a sedative for them, that it is an aphrodisiac, that it is a hallucinogen. No matter what it is, it made both cats delirious. LeRoy rolled in the dirt around the plant, clutching one wet, ragged leaf to his face. Gray acted as if she’d suddenly fallen in love with chicken wire, rubbing up against the cage with the vigor of a much younger cat. The cage seemed to withstand her affection pretty well, so I decided I could leave them unsupervised and go make myself some tea. I went inside and put some water on to boil, got down a clear glass mug, and poured boiling water over the catnip leaves and chamomile flowers. They looked enchanting, floating there in the water, slowly turning it a lovely pale green. The perfect gardener’s drink, I thought.
If I wasn’t sure what effect catnip had on cats, I quickly found out its effect—and the chamomile’s effect—on people. When Scott came home a couple of hours later, he found the back door wide open and the three of us curled up together in the living room—Gray perched on my pillow, wheezing in my ear, LeRoy sprawled across my chest, his head tucked under my chin—all three of us sleeping off our catnip high.
Catnip isn’t the only plant in the garden that cats like. A good cat garden, I have learned from watching LeRoy and Gray, should offer more than their favorite drug. It should provide places to play and hide and things to chase. Here are the plants that I believe the cats would name as their favorites in my garden:
Catmint: Almost as good as catnip, mildly scented with sprays of blue flowers. Both my cats roll around in it and nibble on the leaves.
Grass: A few blades of tall grass here and there will settle a cat’s stomach and keep hair balls in check. I have even grown a pot of “cat grass” indoors for Gray, since she doesn’t get out much.
Rosemary: Large and shady, this plant provides a place for LeRoy to hide and a good spot for a nap on hot days. And it leaves his fur with a sharp, delicious scent for the rest of the day.
Fountain grass: Tall, ornamental grasses have a tendency to wave gently in the breeze, and the combination of the motion and the slight rustling sound makes them impossible to resist pouncing on. I’ve even seen Gray get in on the action when she was feeling good.
