CATS adore gardening, or rather they adore watching a gardener.

No sooner have you donned your Wellies and outdoor clothing and stomped purposefully down the path on a bright morning than they pop out from behind whichever bush they've been up to no good under and trot alongside.

Mine have a lot of garden games. Oscar is rather partial to the 'kill the giant green snake' game and stands waiting for the hose pipe to bite back when he jumps on it and chews the end.

Both of them can never resist an empty bag, the bigger and smellier the better, and can often be found lurking in the bottom of a recently emptied plastic sack which once held manure or some other form of compost. The trick here is to wait until someone picks up the bag and then to leap out and scare them half to death.

Jefferson has invented a kind of leapfrog, only he doesn't bother to jump right over, he just jumps on your back if you bend down. Then, should you straighten up quickly with the shock of a large ginger cat landing between your shoulder blades, he loses his grip and slides downwards, claws out to steady himself. Two doses of that last weekend and my back looks as if I've had a particularly energetic romp with a toy boy.

Their favourite game at the moment, however, is called 'bat the onions' and in cat language it goes like this.

'You watch as a female human arrives in the garden and works for half an hour or so on a patch of ground, and then spends 25 minutes bent double pushing small round, and obviously interesting, objects into the soil. Then when she leaves you emerge from under the beech hedge where you have been concealed and bounce over to the plot. Firstly, both of you have a sudden urge to answer the call of nature. Never mind if you have just 'been', newly dug earth has the same effect as a senna pod so you dig a few experimental holes before completing your toilet.

Then you notice that the little round objects are easily dislodged and just as easily knocked around by an experimental paw. So for the next ten minutes you both have great fun batting them around, scoring goals and sending them skittering in all directions. And the little red ones are best, because they are very round and quite small and drop into all sorts of holes.

This delightful sport is spoilt very soon by the sight of the female human rushing down the path screaming like a banshee, waving her arms and saying totally uncalled for things about your parents, or lack of them.

So you split up and rush across the bank into the field next door - but very soon peek between the undergrowth and notice that the female human is again bent double and appears to be very red in the face. And you feel pretty glad you can't lip read too well because she appears to be saying something about you and your chances of being turned into a bedside rug.

Never mind, you think, she is obviously in need of a cigarette and a cup of coffee, but she's very kindly laying out our sports pitch again and we'll just have time for another game before it gets dark.'

The female human in question has now replanted her onion sets four times and would like to amend the instructions on the side of the packet they came in which said 'gently but firmly push the sets into the ground so that they rest just on the surface', to 'push the sets into the ground and hammer each in place with a six inch nail'.

Keeping cats off your garden is not an easy job because you are dealing with natural inquisitiveness coupled with bloody mindedness and extrasensory perception thrown in for good measure. The latter coming into use when they need to spot the exact section of ground where seeds have just been sown even though the sower thinks she has cleverly disguised the plot by replanting the weeds on top and carefully removing all traces of recent work.

The only saving grace is that if you have our own cats other cats tend to avoid your garden, except the very brave ones who do occasionally carry out a hit and run operation. Although I confess hit is not the word we usually use.

If you don't own a cat you are, sadly, subjected to the attentions of all other cats in the neighbourhood. Out the info goes on the airwaves 'come on lads, spare garden, no resident tom, lots of newly planted begonias'.

I once interviewed a man who had fallen foul of the planning laws by completely covering his small back garden with a wire cage, enclosing his lawn, flower borders and tiny fish pond. His only concession had been to cut a hole for a flowering cherry in the centre of the garden and fitting the wire round it, so that it poked through the top like an umbrella.

He had a deep and long held hatred of cats and their toilet habits (this was the reason my editor had, for some peculiar logic only known to an Irishman from County Cork, said "You like cats Mary, go and interview so and so about his planning row'). He might have added 'go and interview a man who may possibly have trophies of cat heads and tails stuck on boards like moose heads all around his house.' The man certainly had a lifetime of cat anecdotes to tell, or rather bloodcurdling tales of his attempts and methods to keep neighbourhood cats off his carrots, most of them dismal failures. I seem to remember we took a picture of him and his wife sitting under the cage on deckchairs, looking rather like large chickens, and that when the photographer suggested borrowing a cat from next door to perch on the top of the cage and look menacing he asked us to leave.

My own methods of keeping cats off the garden, apart from electrifying the pea sticks (joking) is to lay brushwood over newly planted areas, which does curtail their efforts somewhat.

Actually, sometimes I don't help myself. I once read an interesting article which told how Native Americans, who have grown sweetcorn for hundreds of years, usually dig a deepish hole to plant the corn, drop a raw fish-head down the hole, partially fill it in then pop the plant on top, thus giving instant nutrients. By sheer coincidence I had a stone or so of mackerel given to me about a week later, which needed gutting, so I followed this idea to the letter with both the fish heads and entrails.

The next morning I went out into the garden and found a row of uprooted sweetcorn plants, the accompanying number of holes and in the background the distinctive sound of a cat regurgitating some of the fish heads somewhere in the house.

So as always the score was Cats One - Humans Nil.