DID Bertie Wooster mean to harm Barbara Geltosky in September 2008? The evidence against him is damning. For instance, the hole that Bertie, Ms. Geltosky’s 5-year-old Norwegian elkhound, dug in the garden was 12 inches across and 12 inches deep — the perfect size for a human foot.“It was a hole I didn’t see,” said Ms. Geltosky, 59, a retired art teacher who lives with her husband in Malvern, Pa., some 20 miles west of Philadelphia. “I was getting compost when I went down. I twisted my knee badly enough to have rehab.”
Mr. Wooster, who is unemployed, declined to be interviewed for this article. Bertie — the name the dog answers to at treat time — is black and silver with tuxedo markings on his fur. This double-layered coat, which would make lustrous skiwear for Cruella De Vil, helps to explain his excavation habit.
In the dog days of summer, Ms. Geltosky said: “He likes to lay and be cool. Once it warms up, he’ll dig another one.”
Bertie works fast. A hole takes 10 minutes flat. Often, he’s chasing ground bees. Or he might be following his life’s great passion, vole hunting. “We’ve had to put flagstone right next to our patio,” she said. “My husband’s joke is that someday we’re going to have to pave the whole yard.”
This would be a particular sacrifice for Ms. Geltosky, who is a digger herself, and has ringed her house with perennial beds filled with five-foot-tall Tatarian aster and phlox.
Recently, she has been compelled to plant something with absolutely no ornamental value: a four-foot-high wire fence. “We had it shorter, and that didn’t work,” she said. Bertie “really wanted to be on the other side where all the plants were.”
Bertie is not alone in his appetite for destruction. If gardening is a battle — against drought, bug, weed, blight — the dog is a kind of bumbling fifth column, a saboteur who likes to roll on the grass and have his tummy rubbed.
Read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/garden/26garden.html
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