Our gardens and our four-legged friends can co-exist in harmony, but what do you do if Fido trashes your teucrium or digs up your daphne? A longtime client of mine had a Great Dane called Olive. After twice replacing the relatively small lawn, we decided to take radical action and remove it completely, replacing with a fully planted garden.

The plants had to be either too high for Olive to trample (cane begonias and giant bromeliads) or very low grassy foliage plants (giant mondo, lomandra, dietes) that would yield to her bulk as she passed through. (She seemed to love to wander through them and they were just the right height.)

Sadly, Olive passed on to the big park in the sky, replaced some time later by Wilbur, an excitable ridgeback puppy. As a precaution, we decided to temporarily fence off most sections of the garden, allowing him to wander around some of the less fragile parts for the first seven months. Now the fence has been removed, it appears to have worked and Wilbur avoids the newly exposed garden. (The jury is out whether he gets the same pleasure from the garden as Olive.)

Fences don't need to be high: 600 millimetres should do it. Go higher if you have an active beast, and use black mesh so it disappears. I have also heard of people burying balloons where their dogs dig to give them a fright. Another, more generous, option is to give them an area out of sight that can be mulched, without plants, where dogs can be encouraged to dig and make a mess. As I write this I discover that my canine child, Betty (pictured), has just happily flattened a favourite plant. Some things never change!