Tis the season to be anxious about weeds, garden pests, drought, flood — you name it. In my part of the world, the growth spurt in July is almost indecent, and unless the weather is just right, overgrown plants are suffering from too much or too little water, or from a host of beasties preying upon so much succulent growth.

But I’m not going to talk about any of that. In my garden, two frightening garden pests appeared within weeks of each other: a New Zealand flatworm, a pest which eats earthworms and may presage soil death, and my first garden gnome, a pest which offends good taste and many presage meerkats dressed like Chelsea pensioners.

Is that a flatworm or a potato peel?

A few weeks ago, I moved a trug near the place where I was digging out an apple tree. Curled up where the trug had been was a snotty little circle of flat slime, like a pressed slug. I washed and poked it under the tap — it looked almost exactly like an old peel from a potato or sweet potato, but I suspected from the texture of it that it was something alive. I left it on a plastic lid near the tap, and a few moments later, it was squirming about with its pointy little nose, horrifying me. Yes, it was a New Zealand flatworm.

The best resource I found was this flatworm info website from Northern Ireland, and if you find one in your garden in Scotland, do report it to flatworm expert Dr. Brian Boag, who isn’t currently collecting samples but is mapping its spread. You can also contact his colleagues for England and Wales flatworm sightings.

I put out some black sheeting to try to catch any others, but I have only found the one. When I was digging out the apple tree, I had remarked on the relative lack of earthworms there; there are some observations that earthworms in parts of Scotland have reached an equilibrium with the flatworms, and are not wiped out; we shall see. Ground beetles are thought to predate flatworms, fortunately.

Why is there a gnome in my garden?

My sister-in-law gave each child a garden gnome in their party bag for her girl’s fifth birthday, and my daughter brought hers home and jubilantly placed it in the garden, someplace “he wouldn’t get wet”.

He’s what you might expect: round, hatted, smiling. Now here’s the mystery: why doesn’t he bother me? I’ve been working on making sure the garden isn’t only my place — with the aid of some very wise readers like Carolyn, I let my kids plant literally anything they wanted into their barrel gardens this year, quashing my micromanagement instinct — but still, I would have thought I’d be horrified at gnome creep in my garden.

I’m not. He’s lovely. And after our little dog died earlier this month, my daughter put the gnome on top of Lizzy’s grave. We’re all pretty devastated by losing Lizzy, and I’m glad she has a bit of company. And maybe it will scare off the flatworms.

(Actually I picked up the gnome the other day and what fell out? A ground beetle. Mother Nature is a cunning one.)

I’ve been keeping one of my New Year’s gardening resolutions – the one about sitting down when I’m outside, instead of just doing frantic job after job. I expect I’ll sit a bit more now that my beautiful little dog, who died this morning, is buried in the garden.

My mother believes that heaven is a garden. What do you think? I think it’s true for Lizzy, our lovely 16-year-old terrier cross with the comically outsized front paws. She was usually with me as I worked outside, and the other day she lazed in the sun and watched me tackling my new project.

It’s a seating area; I was digging out a proper path towards a bench we never use, behind a sick apple tree. I’d removed the tree and piled up the soil by the bench; I was thinking of the Gardener’s World episode about Monet’s Giverny garden — it packs in so many flowers because the borders are mounded in the middle.

When I’d placed all the plants, I sat down and watched Lizzy watching me, and I tried to take a vivid mental picture. I will especially remember your wonky, silky ears, I thought — the right one always stood up, the left one folded back.

You need a plan if you’re burying your dog in the garden

If you know your dog may be nearing the end, and you want the burial to be in your garden, don’t put off planning how to do it. Lizzy’s health had been so bad that I had a bit of time to think. In fact the night before last I didn’t sleep at all. Between fits of crying – wailing, really – I made myself plan.

The place for her grave was obvious – I’d dug down very deep to take out the apple tree, and the spade would go in easily there. I would beg the vet to do a house call. How could I bring her to the clinic? She hated it, and on this trip, I couldn’t lie and tell her she’d nothing to worry about. I’d wrap her in my old silk robe; it smells of me, she’d like that. And I could use the clean wicker mat I’d just seen in the closet. More crying, more sleeplessness. At 3:30 I got up, picked up Lizzy from the kitchen and brought her to the couch. She settled into the crook of my legs and we both fell asleep.

This morning, when my husband and I saw how much Lizzy was bleeding and her back legs dragged behind her worse than ever, we rang the vet, who agreed to come to us. I gave Lizzy chicken for breakfast, and a long, luxurious brushing in the garden. Thank God I didn’t need to think, just do the plan: cuddles, robe, mat, grave. The rain was coming on, so I dug out the first bit; my husband would finish it after he’d dropped off the kids. He returned as the vet arrived.

I sat on the ground with my robe over my legs, cradling Lizzy and speaking to her. She never liked to see me cry, so I wasn’t tempted to – I wanted her to experience only my strong, positive voice and the smell of me as I stroked her. After the first injection, a sedative, her sleepy head got heavier on my arm and she began to snore. After the second injection, she was gone in less than a minute. I kept stroking her and kissed her head; my husband finished the digging.

We wrapped her gently and laid her down.

My plants to remember Lizzy – including lamb’s ears, of course

This evening I spoke to Lizzy as I put in the plants: stachys byzantium, silky like her lovely ears, are by the arm of the bench. The rest is a collection of pink to catch the autumn sun: Aster Alma Potschke and Cosmos Bipinnatus Candy Stripe. A few evergreens are around the triangle edges of the mound: Festuca glauca at the tip and helleborus foetidus along the sides.

When I first found Lizzy in the foyer of my apartment building, she had a plastic bag around her waist with a note: “Someone take this dog, as I can’t afford to keep it.” That’s when I was 25. I’m 41 now. It’s a lifetime, isn’t it? For Lizzy, it was a lovely lifetime; and the rest is garden.

This year I’ve put most of my gardening budget into a professional garden design, so I’m in retail shutdown and can’t buy any new plants – at all. But I’ve discovered there are plenty other signs of my garden obsession in my behaviour, even with plant-buying taken out of the equation. Any of this sound familiar?

1. My beautiful baby (plants): I’ve more photos of my borders than my children. From their earliest seed leaves to when they’re big (they grow so fast), my plants dominate my Flickr albums.
2. Tick tock, sun by the clock: I know precisely when each area of the garden gets sun, especially in nooks that see just an hour or two of direct light. This makes me very boring, but it also makes it easier to plan where to put seats, especially for winter sun.
3. In my dreams: Dreams or nightmares about the garden are a regular thing for me. Whether it’s a chat with Alan Titchmarsh or a late frost that killed the hellebores, they’re always unlikely and always feel utterly real.
4. Count plants, not sheep: If I want to distract myself – at the dentist, when swimming laps, or when trying to drop off to sleep – I recite an A-Z alphabet of plants (*has a realisation about the cause of #3 above*).
5. Weather geek: I worry about and watch the forecasts for killing frosts, heavy snow and gales in a way I never did before the garden drew me in. I’m constantly amazed at the plants’ drive to grow, flower and set seed, regardless of the weather.
6. Love the Latin: I now love and want to learn more Latin plant names, a transformation from my first impression of botanical nomenclature as a needlessly pretentious quirk of gardening. The folksy common names are interesting, but you can’t beat the precise, no-room-for-confusion Latin.
7. Stand and stare: Standing outside – or, more usually, looking out a window – I may stay motionless for many minutes, imagining small or big changes I could make to the space. It looks like an absent seizure, but it’s just the gardening obsession.
8. Not great company: Because gardening has taken over eleven-tenths of my brain and this is tedious for people around me, I strain to keep gardening out of conversation. But like any hobbyist, my obsession is how I make sense of the world. Or, more precisely, it is my mental release valve: the vocabulary, beauty and order of it are a great comfort to me. I do try to muster some small talk about holiday plans or current events, but really I’m just waiting for someone to talk about tulips.
9. These are my people: Meeting another garden-obsessive is as good as it gets. The conversation doesn’t just flow, it pours – about everything from holiday plans (for our seedlings) to current events (Chelsea). We need some way to recognise each other faster, like the brooches the masons used to wear.
10. Forever young: Surprises in the garden give me a regular supply of Christmas-morning wonder. The first snowdrop, germinating seeds, baby newts, self-seeded plants – all these first-time-discovery moments make me feel small, safe and sure that everything in the world is well.

Are you garden-obsessed? How can you tell? I’d like to hear about it.

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Be honest: are you taking care of plants in your garden that you don’t actually like? Maybe it’s something your aunt gave to you, or your mother-in-law really likes it, or it was there when you moved in? If you are as obsessed with plants as I am, and study all corners of your garden to figure out where you can shoehorn in more, you need to decide whether these are good enough reasons to look after something that smells bad, bullies its neighbours, or simply leaves you cold.

Here’s a quick list of plants that have felt the hard edge of my spade this year:

French lavender: the showy purple wings aren’t enough to make me hold onto a plant which doesn’t have that pure lavender scent. By contrast, the English Lavender Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead’ has a heart-stoppingly beautiful fragrance, even before the flowers come out.

Hardy geraniums: I love the geranium “Johnson’s blue”, but earlier this year I pulled out a huge clump of a different hardy geranium I’d been given which had the most awful resinous scent. What a great feeling — and I immediately recognised how I could better use the space it had been sprawling across.

Rosa Tess of the Urbervilles: the first time I saw the David Austin roses in their free catalogue I couldn’t believe that something could be so beautiful. So many of his varieties have layer upon layer of petals, and Tess is one of the most ravishing to look at. But it has that myrrh scent which to me recalls medicinal ointment. No thanks.

Neglected fern: I actually really like this little fern but it had been lost beneath an overgrown Garrya elliptica, which I’ve steadily been pruning back to the wall over the last few years. Both plants were in situ when I moved in, and I think that stopped me interfering with them too much. But the Garrya had to be pulled right back this year, as I look for more sunny places to grow vegetables (near the Garrya I’ll be growing the dwarf French bean, Masterpiece). I yanked out the fern with a bit of root ball and potted it up, and I’m happy and a bit surprised to see it hasn’t died. I’ll find it a nice home elsewhere in the garden.

Eucalyptus gunnii: my sister sent me a tree in a box when we first moved into this house, but even with yearly coppicing this plant just didn’t fit into our garden. I have composted it (with my sister’s blessing).

If your garden is a blank canvas, you may be thinking harder about how to fill it up than what to purge, but promise yourself now that you will only grow what you like. It’s a great time of year to visit gardens, garden centres or public parks to see what appeals to you. Choose wisely, and plant your kind of plants. You won’t regret it.

Is there anything you feel you can’t get rid of in your garden? I’d like to hear about it.

A couple years ago, I found myself screaming if I uncovered a frog in the garden — it was just the suddenness and mouselike look of their movement that startled me. I got over it by figuring out where they might like to hide, and preparing myself whenever I approached. It worked! Now I love my frogs: last year we built a little pond for them and our local newt, but it’s in a sunken part of the garden inaccessible to many of our plants, so I collect slugs from where I don’t want them and deliver them poolside. The frogs don’t hop off when I approach, but I’ve discovered that the slugs do have to be the right size, or frog struggles to cope, as you’ll see here: