Plant a Garden for Healthy Pets

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For millennia, pets and people have been good for each other. The bond between humans and animals is affectionate, healthy and healing.

But we sometimes forget that long before we domesticated animals, we humans grew plants that provided healing. And for thousands of years before domestication, the wild animals and still relatively wild humans were constantly connected to health-giving plants.

Gardening is an easy, available and affordable way to renew this sustaining pets-plants-people triad. Some simple methods can create an atmosphere in your garden — and in your gardening — that will further enhance the healthy collaboration.

Grow What You Love

You might as well grow herbs you love — the ones you think smell good or look pretty, those that have a particular mythology that interests you, or plants that fit your landscape. Many horticultural experts say that the plants that grow best for any individual are those the individual cares about the most.

There’s something to this concept of selecting plants for love, rather than trying to pick the ones you feel you ought to plant, or that your pet might need for health reasons. The most important thing you can do with any remedy is to use it. Because each herb has dozens of active ingredients, almost any individual herb will have a wide range of activities in the body. Thus, almost every medicinal herb will be effective by itself, acting to balance or enhance many organ systems at once.

The key is to get your pet to take his daily or weekly dose of herbs without worrying about which specific herb is the very best one to use today. I’m convinced the best use of herbal medicines is for all pets to have at least a weekly dose of one tonic or culinary herb as a general health-maintenance routine.

If your pet has a condition that requires therapeutic levels of herbal or other kinds of medicine, I recommend consulting an herbalist or other qualified holistic practitioner. Let their knowledge of the specific medicines your pet needs guide your herbal selection and the dosage of the medicine — recognizing that the therapeutic level of herbal medicines likely will be much higher than a daily dose of tonic herbs taken straight from the garden.

Do What You Love

Those of us who are interested in herbs have a love for the open air and the moderate exercise it takes to tend the garden. We also revel in the fragrances of the garden, aromas that vary with the time of year and the stage of plant growth. (For me, even the donkey droppings I spread in the spring and fall has an incomparable odor that I’ve come to appreciate, if not actually love.)

All of these — the outside contact that gives us a presence with nature’s cycles, the necessary physical activity, the healthy aromas wafting in the air — are healthy for people and their pets alike.

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