I'm always delighted when I come across a piece of information that supports my affection for cats. This week I found the piece de resistance: one of the most famous gardens in the world, the 435ha Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, actually has cats on the payroll.
More than a dozen cats are employed there as members of the gardens' integrated pest management team, and they patrol all of Longwood's grounds, from the nursery and the Peirce-du Pont house to the Abbondi composting facility. Gareth Morgan, eat your heart out.
Each cat has an assigned area of the garden, and a human caretaker. The responsibilities these felines take on are varied. Their primary job is on the rodent control task force, dealing to voles, mice, rats and chipmunks, but they also work as greeters, work supervisors, lap warmers and highly skilled catmint pruners. They toil in exchange for food, shelter, and a health-care plan that includes annual check-ups and vaccinations and emergency treatment when required.
I discovered all of this in the course of investigating the demise of my catnip plant. Astonishing what you find when you type the word "cat" into Google. The absence of catnip has had a profound effect on our brain-damaged cat, who has been in the habit of spending most of her day lying on it, so it has to be replaced. I'm ashamed to admit that it died of thirst: we recently had a roof built over the pergola, cutting off the supply of rainwater to the pot plants. Luckily the catnip was the canary in the coalmine and I managed to rescue the rest of the herbs and two dwarf lemon trees before they went the same way.