“Donald’s Garden”

Someone in the IMDb goofs for this cartoon is taking things way too seriously, asking if perhaps the gopher has an eating disorder. No single gopher could eat the entirety of a garden like this after all. Because if there’s one thing cartoons are known for, it’s realism. A cartoon involving a duck wearing a straw hat and sailor’s shirt is definitely going to be accurate in the eating habits of animals in the family Geomyidae. I’m sure the cartoonists even looked up which of the roughly forty species in the family are native to Southern California, right?

Donald’s got a garden. One of his watermelons is even shown having won a blue ribbon at the Pomona Fair, though how that’s possible while it’s still growing is its own question. First, there’s some trouble with a pump. Then, his watering can falls apart, and the water goes into a gopher burrow. The gopher notices Donald’s garden and decides to eat everything it sees. This includes, of course, the watermelons. Donald is displeased.

I strongly suspect this cartoon exists because of the Victory Garden concept. The poster, in fact, shows the melons in the shape of a V, presumably for that very reason. For once, this means I suspect a lot of people can relate to some of Donald’s frustration. Oh, we had hoses when I was a kid, of course. And we didn’t have gophers. However, the frustration of trying to make the ground produce crops is one that doesn’t rely on specifics. I may have more intense memories about, say, anise plants and rock-hard soil, but it does often feel as though nature is mocking you for daring to think you can control it.

Actually, Donald was a helpful foil for the vagaries of wartime problems. Victory Gardens, tire rationing, and even being a GI were things he dealt with, bearing the issues others did as well. Donald could suffer without being real—and laughing along with him was a way of complaining without feeling unpatriotic. Having to patch and repatch a tire with whatever you could find did suck, and it was okay for Donald to lose his temper at it. Donald lost his temper at everything, and for once, it was something that deserved it.

And doubtless, yes, no few would-be gardeners lost crops to gophers. Not like this; apparently, gophers are solitary creatures, and the pedantic IMDb editor is correct that no single gopher could eat this much food, many times its body weight, at once. But gophers and moles, mice and rats, birds and bugs. Been there, done that; we got a lot of bugs, mostly. But if you’re any kind of gardener, you have sympathy with how it feels as though your entire garden is eaten before you can pick a single thing. And let’s face it, any gopher confronted with Donald will attempt to eat many times its body weight just to spite him, because he will provoke it if it doesn’t start things.