Feature Garden: A Place for Paws
04 Jul 2010
This backyard was completely re-landscaped to make it user-friendly for the owner and her dogs. Here is her advice for creating a dog-friendly yard.
Photos by Ryan James One day, Barbee James looked at her backyard terraces flush with flowers, sweeping down a slope to merge with an emerald expanse of open space just beyond the fence. James took in the picturesque scene and knew exactly what she had to do. Rip it out.

Not Gone to the Dogs
After consulting with garden experts, James found bedding plants that didn’t mind a good trampling. Chief among them are ground covers like thyme and ice plant, and mosses for shady areas. “I have a woolly thyme, a gray thyme and a creeping thyme,” James says. “They’re low-water, they grow fast and fill in, and they take abuse.”
The ground covers also keep the integrity of her planting beds, which are covered in 1.5-inch-diameter gravel. More importantly, the ground cover–gravel combo makes the garden an all-season playground by keeping mud off paws in winter. “All my flower beds have rock on them so the dogs don’t track mud in the house,” James says. “I don’t want to contain the dogs, and I don’t want to wipe off their paws all the time.” With rock, ground covers and grass, “only water gets inside from snow, and that’s a lot easier to deal with than mud.”
What’s harder to deal with is James’ first choice of using pea gravel to cover her beds. The dogs’ paws fling it everywhere. “Trying to keep that little pea gravel out of the grass is a nightmare. I’m always cleaning it out of the yard.” Because she laid it 3-inches deep, it was too difficult to remove it all, so she simply covered the remainder with larger gravel. “I thought the pea gravel would be easier on their paws, but they don’t care,” she says. She didn’t use bark mulch because of the high winds in her location.
Looser, vine-like plants like vinca don’t fare well under paws either, until they’re established. “But purple Japanese iris, tulips, daffodils and daylilies are really sturdy,” she says, adding that denser vines do well, too. (See related article “No-No Plants for Pups”.) Junipers, creeping blue spruce, mugo pine, honey locust, lilacs, alyssum and lavender dot her dog-friendly yard. She supplements these with colorful pots planted with petunias, pansies, geraniums and other annuals. She also installed a bat box to cut down on mosquitoes from the nearby lake that could potentially carry the threat of heartworm.
