Father, forgive me, it has been… hmmm… a long time since my last confession. My sin? Living in Pasadena and not being a gardener. Thanks to our hired gardeners, our front yard, at least, looks nice enough so we don’t get run out of town by Pasadena Beautiful (whose president, alas, lives across the street, keeping the whole neighborhood on its toes).

Courtesy of Dirt Du Jour

And yet even though I don’t garden (other than trying not to kill a few herbs every summer), I’ve been enjoying the new Dirt Du Jour, a website and daily e-report (much like Daily Candy) aimed at Southern California gardeners. The daily e-mails are short, sweet and inspirational, providing inspiration even to those of us who have trouble distinguishing an annual from a perennial. And today’s e-mail was so much fun that I couldn’t resist passing it along, and not just because of this fantastic photo. They’re having a contest: What Kind of Dog is Your Garden? Gardens do indeed have personality, just like dogs, and if you submit the most amusing garden/dog depiction by midnight on Thursday, April 30th, you win a copy of the book Growing Your Own Vegetables. Check it out at dirtdujour.com.

Molly on our not-quite-dead back lawn

As for our garden, it is remarkably like our dog, Molly, a labradoodle: an untidy but often charming mishmash, never as well groomed as it should be, yet friendly enough to host summertime barbecues in the back yard and not frighten off Jehovah’s Witnesses in the front yard.