Mission: Save the Hosta from the 3-legged cat

I know the title sounds completely bizarre, but it's exactly what I've been attempting to do for the last month. I have a 3-legged cat called "Jake the peg" who absolutely loves our water feature in the woodland garden. In fact, he loves any water: he tries to get in the bath and the shower continually, sits out in the rain for hours and drinks from the waste pipe when I've finished washing up (yuck!) I think he must have been a fish or a duck in a previous life.

Jake's love of the water feature has spelled disaster for my lovely Hosta. I decided to plant my new Hosta next to the water feature when I was planting up the woodland garden last autumn, thinking to myself that it would look beautiful all opened out with the water flowing beautifully behind it. These dreams were dashed twofold: once by the hosepipe ban; and again by Jake's enthusiasm for the water feature.

My poor little Hosta has been repeatedly sat on, squashed and batted by clumsy paws for the last few weeks and has barely had time to emerge from the ground, while his brothers safely nestled at the back near the fence are doing brilliantly.

First I tried to cover it over with half a plastic drinks bottle (a method I use a lot in the allotment with baby courgettes and beans - they love the humidity and protection) but unfortunately Jake thought nothing of swatting the plastic aside to get a better angle to the water.

Now, I have tried instead to construct a sort of protective barrier from bits of cane I had lying around. Actually these were from some placemats we brought from Ikea - you know the ones that are like lots of lengths of really thin bamboo strung together? When they got old and raggedy instead of throwing them away we just unraveled them and now I use the handy canes for propping up young sweet peas or cornflowers - or in this case, keeping bouncy cats off my plants.

I hope this works, otherwise I'll have to get rid of the cat....