She’s as Sweet as She Can Be!

Every garden needs a mascot — or two.

This post will introduce you to Nestle, one of the mascots for Serendipity Gardens. She is a chocolate Labrador Retriever, and she’s been with us since 2004, the year we started the garden. You could say they’ve grown up together.

As you can see from her photo, Nestle is showing her age a bit. But that has not dampened her enthusiasm.

Nestle is a faithful participant in Serendipity Gardens. She’s always eager to go outside, perhaps to chase away a rabbit, or perhaps just to sniff around or have a rest in the shade. She barks ferociously when visitors come, but as soon as they are inside the fence, she’s extremely friendly. She doesn’t jump on people, thank goodness, but she certainly believes in bathing them with kisses.

She also believes in cleanliness. Her way to bathe is to jump into the pond. I always wonder what the frogs think about suddenly having this giant, shaggy creature standing in their living room!

Nestle’s favorite activity of all is to run after a Frisbee or a tennis ball. I believe she would do it a hundred times if her humans had the patience to throw it that many times! She never forgets, either. Once, during a hard winter with constant frozen snow cover, she repeatedly visited a spot in the yard, pawing and sniffing at it every day. What is she doing? we wondered. When spring finally melted the snow, we found out. A Frisbee lay there, waiting for its owner, who had known it was there all along.

Nestle is pretty careful to run along the paths in the garden rather than straight through the garden beds. She slips up occasionally. If you accidentally throw the Frisbee into the middle of a bed, you can bet she’s going in after it! All things considered, though, she does little harm. Her co-mascot, Buster the cat, is a different story. More on him later.

To get to know Nestle a little better, visit A Dog’s Advice to Leaders.