Nepeta
Anyone who has drunk an oat milk cappuccino at Federation coffee (proudly displaying the banner “buy overpriced hipster coffee here”) can see how much Brixton has changed in the last 20 years. In line to buy salmon roulade in the M&S food hall, who could doubt that the riotous Brixton of the 90s is a thing of the past. But the truth is that behind the grand Georgian exteriors of our picture perfect, wisteria festooned street, a sinister scene of drugs and violence continues. Worse still, Toby and I have unwittingly found ourselves implicated at the heart of it.
Our first year passed without issue and little Penelope, our sweet and innocent cat who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, blithely frolicked in the garden, dutifully fertilising my efforts at planting and spending her days dozing in bucolic bliss. After breakfast each morning she would sit at the top of the garden path for a full 5 minutes, planning her day, savouring her new sense of freedom and the wholesome promise of the fresh air.
In spring 2017 as part of a wave of planting we brought in 5 Nepeta faassenii ‘Walker’s Low’ which I placed along our ugly concrete path and which I hoped would blur its edges with furry foliage and sage flowers. A thinking woman’s lavender. I had spent far too long enviously perusing photos of cottage garden brick paths meandering through a haze of the stuff and I think I had decided that if I couldn’t have the bricks, Nepeta would somehow transform my concrete slabs.
Little did we know that this decision marked the start of a period of long and painful decline for Penelope and, in introducing her to Nepeta (or ‘catnip’), we had turned her paradise into a feline Class A drug den.
She seemed very positive about the introduction at first. She would roll on the plants endlessly before doing back flips in the garden and chasing her tail. Reaching maenadic heights of ecstasy she would charge from the end of our garden to the front door before collapsing exhausted in the last of the afternoon sun beneath our apple tree. Still, not a bad life.
If I am honest with myself, we knew at the time she was developing a problem and that we were in effect culpable as her suppliers, but it seemed innocent enough. A brief look on Google told us that Nepeta, or catnip, was a sedative when ingested but when rolled in and inhaled produced similar effect on cats to that of a heady combo of Ecstasy and LSD in a human (I would be fascinated to have been a fly on the wall for this research). It was harmless. I remember that, at the time, my main complaint was Penelope’s frenzied rolling which left bare patches around each plant where nothing grew.
In May 2018 our darling Arthur was born and although our Nepeta problem turned more sinister many of the warning signs went unremarked as poor Penelope was no longer the focus of our attention. She would spend days in the bed, no longer confining her frolics to fine days but forlornly nuzzling in the rain while we were so busy trying to work out how to be parents.
Over time word got round and more and more cats came to the garden. Penelope cowered in the kitchen as bruisers twice her size would snuffle around and cavort about my increasingly sad looking ‘dry border’. Mostly they would only leave when I got out the sprinkler. I remember an evening worthy of Hitchcock when, sat with little Arthur at the kitchen table, I saw Penelope staring rigid at our skylight. The neighbour’s cat leered down at us, his face pressed to the glass, eyes glowing, as he staggered about threateningly. None of us slept well that night.
Finally we went away for a weekend and returned to a horror scene in the kitchen. Blood, fur, and a spray which has permanently marked our kitchen floor. P was nowhere to be seen.
After weeks of frantic searching we came to accept her presumed passing and mourned her with heavy hearts. Then, miraculously, she returned, looking haggard, very thin and slightly grey but still in one piece. Perhaps she lost her way and temporarily joined a gang, seduced by a Tom and the promise of delights even headier than catnip. Perhaps she ran away knowing it was her only chance to escape the drug culture that we had created only metres from her cat flap. Either way, Nepeta left her cold turkey and homeless on the streets of Brixton until starvation brought her home. I can joke about it now as she sits, whole and healthy on the sofa beside me, but at the time her disappearance and her state on return were very distressing.
Thankfully she has made a full recovery, and Nepeta has been removed from our path. It’s the right call, but it’s a shame. I still find myself looking wistfully at it in other peoples’ gardens, flopping around in early summer looking elegant but wooly. If I had a bigger garden I would replace it with Perovskia ‘Little Spires’, or I suppose with Lavender, but then, if I had a big enough garden I wouldn’t have problems with city cats in the first place. Perhaps one day when P and I are old we will live miles from anyone and any cat, in a garden with sunny paths lined with the Nepeta “Six Hills Giant” of which I have always dreamed. I will start on the Gin and Tonics at 11 and P will roll in catnip to her heart’s content, tracing gently whirling visions through the sky as we bask beneath an apple tree.
