” …Gardens, my beautiful gardens,
nowhere in the world can you find such gardens.”
Czesław Miłosz, Shepherd’s song 

 

The gardener tends to the roses in her garden. She softens the flowerbeds, fertilizers the soil, clips the stems, carries heavy watering cans to give them water they need, covers and protects them for the winter.
Her hands are often dirty and scratched by the thorns, her back hurts from bending over them and heavy lifting.

But in the summer time she lovingly looks at them move in the warm breeze, she enjoys and admires the diversity of her roses’ textures and shades. The shapes of the flowers and their brilliant colors delight her when the sunlight changes them every single moment of the daytime.

They teach her how to appreciate them. And not surprisingly, day by day, the roses begin to look after her as well. They make her proud, and seeing other people admire them makes her smile more and more.
Finally, she realizes that their beauty does not exist without the thorns. She knows that this perfect match of beauty and pain makes them unique.

Time passes and the gardener cannot imagine her life without her roses. And her roses cannot exist without her either. There are many rose gardens in the neighbourhood but that one is a very special one. They say one-of-a-kind.

• Indeed, my roses are not easy to grow. You need to nurture them with love and passion. Than, they start to bloom beautifully and change your life for sure, my dears – she says.

Don’t these words sound familiar? The analogy here goes like this: we share the very same passion: our borzois are the roses that we give our hearts to.

For me September 2018 and the chance to meet you all during the unofficial borzoi show & coursing organized by the Borzoi Club from Sweden was very much like a walk around a garden. I could admire the rose varieties that you grew or are growing in your gardens. And they were also so beautiful, every single one of them. Some of them were ripe and in full blossom, others were still budding.

At the very beginning of our adventure with breeding pedigree dogs, each one of us is drawn into a sort of contest: to breed dogs in order to win at dog show or coursing events. We feel the need to show, to confront, to be finally able to appreciate what we have.
Visiting other gardens is always a good idea, as when we visit them, we get a new vantage point and we see plants from our own garden in a completely new light.

Still, in too many cases the main driver of our breeding is just desire to win. Sometimes all you need to change this attitude is time. Sometimes you will need a good mentor who will instill the passion in you. Sometimes you will find the passion on your own.
When this finally happens, nothing will ever be the same. Then the success of your breeding will not be tantamount to winning a show, and the newly found perspective on the borzoi will stop us from destroying the spirit of this magnificent breed.
After all, the success of our breeding cannot be measured by the numbers of plastic cups or the number of dog shows our dog won. True success is when we grow and we look at our borzois with heightened awareness. This is the moment when  we touch this elusive thing that we can call the spirit of borzois.

To want to become better is part of our nature. Too often we are chasing success and the place on podium. This chase is something foreign to our dogs. They seems unimpressed by shining cups.

Why I’m writing about all of this?
Because I’ve been down that road and it was not easy. I went to dog shows and I reveled in winning until I understood that the borzoi’s soul is far from all the hustle and bustle of competitions, from all the skirmishes and squabbles about whose borzoi is the most beautiful.
This does not matter at all. What matter is understanding the needs of the dog we look after. What matter is giving him the best possible conditions and taking care of the assets that were so important to those who started the breed. Then the success, even the biggest one, will come by itself.

I have often pondered the words of breeders I read in articles of borzois. I have pondered the breeder’s work: their objectives and the image of the ideal borzoi. Often I looked at the pictures placed next to the words and I was not able to see the things they wrote about. Now I think I know the reason: the breeding plan needs time and clearly defined objectives.

But coming back to our September meeting, a new aspect comes to my mind, something I have never considered before. What I mean is seeing borzois through the prism of experience. After all my time with borzois I know that a dog’s qualities are not a product of  genes only, the environment and nutrition are far more important. Now I know that dogs may be so different depending on the conditions they are growing in. I know that borzoi puppies growing up in different homes may be as different as chalk and cheese. I know how difficult it is for a breeder choose a new home for his puppies.
I do realize that participating in a dog show means voluntarily subjecting our dogs to evaluation and ranking.
However, considering my whole experience this does not seem so obvious.

Being able to look at the breed from the judge’s seat open your eyes and open your heart. It opens your mind, gets you thinking and makes you understand the work of other breeders, even though our preferences may be different.
Because at that moment our preferences must give way to the breed standard. All of this has one and same objective: to ensure better breeding. That is the real value of dog shows where we can meet and look at the breed through the eyes of the judge. This is an unrivalled experience.

That sow was a valuable lesson for me: I’m too emotionally attached to borzois to be able to assess them. A god judge should keep his distance and this is something that I’m not able to do.
Im not ashamed to say that I love borzois. That I understand them. To others my decisions may seem strange, but they are always taken with my dogs well-being in mind.
Borzois talk, borzois understand, borzois miss. No matter where they live, no matter what their owners’ language is.
For me they are the greatest dogs under the sun and I was so lucky to be able to meet a large pack of borzois on a September weekend.

This trip was an amazing experience, which made me realize that my path with zois is leading in a totally different direction than I previously thought. This is the direction where the heart and love are as an important part of the way as knowledge and passion.

What I want to wish to all of you is this: stop looking around the world for the best roses. Stop looking, because the most precious and most beautiful roses are growing in your very own garden.

 

translated by Piotr Łabiński
written for Borzoi-Ringens