While planting my garden this year I decided to get rid of my assortment of gnomes and trolls and replace them with a garden Buddha. My gnomes are delightful and bring me great joy, but they are there to deter animals from snacking on my beautiful vegetables and plants. The animals seem to have missed the message I’ve been trying to send with my garden gnomes and I feel that maybe they will respond better to a garden Buddha.

I went shopping online for my garden guardian because I couldn’t think of a local retail store that would sell a garden Buddha. I spend a lot of time in nurseries and in the gardening sections of big chain stores, so I have some authority on this. I also couldn’t picture asking the manager at Home Depot where I could find a garden Buddha in his store.

I found exactly what I was looking for online, and with speedy shipping I had my garden Buddha set up in my garden four days later. While I initially bought him to scare away the squirrels and chipmunks and stray cats in the neighborhood who love to eat things like bulb flowers and herbs, I found that after a few days I really didn’t care if my garden Buddha did its job of protecting my garden. I didn’t care because I was in love with it, and the happiness I experienced every morning when I looked out at my garden and saw a pale gray Buddha sitting in the middle with the sun shining off his big round belly was reward enough for me.

After a couple of weeks I realized that my garden Buddha was not only not doing his job, but he was actually attracting the animals to his belly. More than once I found a neighborhood cat curled up against his bulging abdomen, fast asleep in the sun. I never would’ve thought a cat would be drawn to a stone Buddha figure. Maybe cats are more spiritual than I thought and maybe I underestimated their spirituality by assuming that the Buddha would have to be made out of pillows for them to be drawn to it. I guess the only logical thing to do is get my hands on some fox urine and sprinkle it around the perimeter of my garden to make it less attractive to the animals, because I’ve become so attached to the Buddha that I’ve decided he is there to stay.