I’m in the dentist’s office waiting room, waiting. I glance at the stack of magazines which includes the usual suspects. Ladies magazines. Health magazines. News and money magazines. And one that, for comic perfection, beats Notting Hill’s “Horse and Hound.”

“Garden and Gun!” Honest.

What better title to sum up the Dixie dream of Southern belles with hoop skirts and Rhett with his hunting dog and rifle. How stodgy “Southern Living” seems by comparison. You can almost smell the magnolias and gunpowder on the plantation. And for me it also looks like easy money since a true-life submission for “Garden and Gun” instantly springs to mind.

My wife gardens, or did until nature fought back. Behind our faux cottage house, on a neighborhood street between a larger manse to the left and another to the rear and a smaller house to the right, is a small rectangular garden space at basement level with trellis and walk, screened from neighbors on all sides by bushes. It is overlooked by a deck above at first floor level.

The gardener in the family put half in flowers and the rest in seasonal vegetables and herbs. Then, on a summer’s evening she could watch at her leisure as squirrels and birds made the kind of mess of the garden the Witch in “Into the Woods” lamented – “robbing me, annoying me, rooting through my rutabaga, raiding my arugula and ripping up the rampion.” The witch got even with a curse, my wife decided to do something worse.

Her uncle, who had a larger, more secluded lot out in the more rural county proposed a solution that had worked for him. He loaned her a pellet gun to discourage the critters in good pioneer fashion. Her aim was not to kill, but to increase the cost of doing business for the predators. Maybe they’d move on to someplace with easier or less painful pickings. Though I suspect the thought of a dead squirrel or two brought to mind mouthwatering dreams of Brunswick Stew – a staple of southern, road-kill cuisine.

So, quick as you can say “Garden and Gun,” there she is on the deck one evening in her nightshirt, feet up on the railing like Henry Fonda in “My Darling Clementine.” She’s got her pump action pellet gun at the ready and a glass of red wine at her side.

Unfortunately, the overall effect of this tableaux is closer to Granny on “The Beverly Hillbillies” than to Scarlet at Tara. And fiddle-dee-dee, there’s one slight problem with the master plan. She can’t seem to come anywhere near hitting a squirrel. In fact, they are picking tomatoes and pausing to nibble them as she repeatedly takes aim and misses. They seem to be deliberately mocking her marksmanship.

It gets worse. Though she believes she was performing this act in private, a neighbor whose yard abuts the spectacle calls another neighbor who’s a friend of my wife and who has been known to take potshots at her own vermin. She in turn calls my wife to warn that the neighborhood jungle telegraph has now got people fearing for the lives of their children. Or at least that she’ll shoot their eyes out, like Ralphie in “A Christmas Story.” They threaten to call the cops if this drunken Annie Oakley keeps potting away at rodents from her deck.

There seems to be some misapprehension that she is firing off live rounds from an actual rifle in suburbia, though a moment’s thought would suggest the lack of noise means either they are wrong or she is using a silencer. The fear that she might hit a child by accident is only slightly more plausible, if only because she sure can’t hit a squirrel on purpose. And the pellet gun hasn’t got enough range to endanger a neighbor.

The threat of recourse to meddling by the “Nanny State” raises my wife’s Scots-Irish, “Live Free or Die” hackles and creates some long-lived bad blood. But, rather than face being haled into court on a pellet gun or reckless endangerment charge, she ceases and desists. This unfortunately means the garden is left to the cruel depredations of the squirrels and their avian co-conspirators.

And upon reflection, it also means I don’t have a salable feature since, by the end of summer, we’ve got no gun and no garden. Hardly a happy ending from the perspective of readers of “Garden and Gun.”