Toxic plants in garden??

[earsofvelvet]

We have recently acquired a beautiful golden retriever puppy, she is utterly enchanting .

This had never crossed my mind, but someone told me to check whether any of the plants in the garden might be toxic to dogs. So a lot bit of googling later, and I have a long list of things we have in our garden (about 1/3 to 1/2 of all our plants, shrubs and trees) which are supposedly toxic to a (mostly unspecified) degree.

She is quite chewy and loves hiding in the borders, I'm doing my best not to let her chew on anything but realistically I'm not going to be able to watch her every minute of her time in the garden, or stop her chewing on / eating what's there.

I'm feeling very fortunate that I actually had a written plan from the original planter so I know what we have in the garden - I wouldn't have a clue otherwise - but also confused and amazed that I never even knew this was a thing. Do I have to get rid of all these plants?? (Do most dog owners know what they have in their gardens? and which plants might be harmful??)

Obviously we'll dig up the garden if that's what we need to do, but in an ideal world it wouldn't be necessary, and I'm feeling pretty clueless - anybody knowledgeable who can advise please?? I can list the plants if necessary!

[earsofvelvet]

bump for the active threads lot!

[Floralnomad]

It's not just plants its bulbs as well if your dog is a digger , when our dog was a pup he dug up and chewed a daffodil bulb and was extremely unwell ,our answer was to put an ornamental fence around the patio so dog is only allowed near the grass / plants when he is supervised , the bonus of this is that the garden stays looking nice and I don't have mud in the house when it's wet . Dog has a digging pit ( sand) on the patio to satisfy his digging urges .

[earsofvelvet]

Thanks Floralnomad. We don't have a patio but we could try putting a barrier in front of the borders I suppose. I suspect that would encourage digging though. How did I not know this was an issue... I'm genuinely astonished!

[Floralnomad]

It's not something we had thought about either , this was our first dog but my family have had dogs all my life and never restricted garden access and never had any issues , we had only had our pup a week when he chewed the daff !

[TheDogsCat]

We took out the toxic plants that were most likely to kill a puppy from my parents garden when I got my golden. There's still a ton of poisonous plants in the garden, but they'll just give an adventurous dog a stomach ache rather than anything more serious. So far (seven years) he's left them well alone. If it has a bitter taste and won't do any harm beyond a sore stomach and some nausea then most dogs will leave it well alone. But it's not safe to take that approach with anything potentially deadly. Especially as Goldens will eat anything. My ddog will eat pretty much anything that fits in his mouth, with the notable exceptions of worming tablets, lettuce and bread.

[earsofvelvet]

Thanks TheDogsCat - how do you establish which plants are potentially deadly? I didn't find any really good resources / websites when I was trawling the web, I ended up with about 8 sites open in different tabs and searching each plant in all of them...

The plants I've got which I think seem worse than the others are clematis armandii, piers japonica and calluna but (a) I don't know how bad these are, i.e. 3 or 10 or anything in between on a scale of 10, and (b) there's a whole list of others also on the list which might be almost as bad or might not really be a cause for concern at all...

How did you know what to take out??

[dodobookends]

There is a very good comprehensive list on the Kennel Club website, which lists the worst "Take to the vet NOW!!!" ones.

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) website has a toxic garden plants list too I think.

[TheDogsCat]

I'm afraid I just left it to my parents who already knew which were particularly deadly. However there was a couple plants had to be left (too deep rooted to remove completely) and ddog has stayed well away. Not something I'd reccomend risking though. On a side note ddog likes to 'plant' himself deep into the flowerbeds out of sight, so don't assume that a plant is safe just because it's unaccessable. If she wants to fit in the space, then I'm afraid she probably will succeed.

For house plants I look at the poisoning symptoms of each plant. It's not so tedious a job to look up online when you can do it for one plant at a time.

[earsofvelvet]

Thanks very much Dodo and DogsCat, i will look at the Kennel Club and RHS and do a bit more googling for symptoms tomorrow.