Welcome to my wildlife, or rather, rabbit garden
While I didn't set out to be Head Gardener for a clan of rabbits led by a fearless matriarch, I found that changing the story I tell myself when I find my plants eaten has made it a lot more fun.
When I said I wanted to create a wildlife garden, I didn’t have rabbits in mind. I dreamed of dragonflies, monarch butterflies, moths, and bees buzzing around, and even the sweet-looking hedgehogs featured on my favorite British gardening show (no, hedgehogs aren’t found in the wild in the United States, but this is my little gardening fantasy, and they are part of it). I did have a frog that took up residence in my whiskey barrel mini-pond last summer, and I loved seeing him, along with his girlfriend who visited from time to time, sitting amongst the flowers, looking for shade, and deciding how close they would let me get before jumping back into the safety of the water with big kerplunks. And sure, there are squirrels and chipmunks and birds and pollinators of all sorts. But it seems that my backyard wildlife garden has transformed into the manor home of a rabbit clan. This summer, the matriarch has made it clear that I am her family’s Head Gardener, and that I’d better improve my performance before she fires me.
It wasn’t always this way. A few years ago, I would see evidence of a rabbit passer-by now and again in my borders, when a flower would be shorn off at the top. And sure, I gave up on planting tulips after I realized that I had to snap a photo the first morning they were in bloom, lest they be devoured before I came out again in the evening. Our dog would be thrilled to find little deposits of rabbit pellets (gross!) on the berm from time to time when we would go out for a walk. But, the rabbits pretty much stayed out of sight and were afraid of all of us.
I started to notice the change last summer. One day, I found a deep hole in a large round planter that is filled with Mediterranean herbs. The next day, that hole was neatly covered over again with grass. Confident that no one else in my household would have noticed the hole nor have taken the time to cover it, I found a twig and used it to move the grass aside gently so I could peer underneath, where I discovered a den of little tiny rabbit kits. Perhaps the aroma of thyme, oregano, and rosemary masked their scent, but our French Bulldog, who was standing three feet away, didn’t even detect them. Mama’s fluffle grew up without being bothered by us, and she promptly staked her claim on the territory.
This year, their expansion was obvious from early spring, as I found more and more damage as the hungry family treated my borders like their own potager. I tried in vain to protect the tender growing plants by sprinkling a liberal coating of products like Rabbit Scram and Cayenne Pepper. Echinacea? Mowed down. Yarrow? Gnawed to a stub. Cucumber seedlings? The clan waited patiently for the first real leaves to emerge, and then made a meal out of each and every one. I replanted, and moved the pots to a high bench. In the borders, I fashioned cylinders out of chicken wire and bamboo to try to allow some of the plants to bounce back from their haircuts, and felt for a moment that I was taking back control.
Undeterred, onto the next bed the rabbits went. The front door of our Cape-style home has a trellis, and every year I plant pink morning glories and white moonflowers to lend a little cottage charm to our facade. This year, I soaked the seeds and planted them after the threat of frost had passed. The shoots appeared, and were promptly eaten. I grumpily re-planted. They were mowed down again. I am nothing if not ridiculously stubborn, so I re-re-planted, and as the seedlings emerged against the side of the steps, I surrounded them with chicken wire on all three exposed fronts. A couple of weeks later, I noticed that the plants were growing well, but that just the very tippy tops were neatly nibbled. Argh! I imagined the daredevil young rabbits climbing up the stairs and dangling down from the stoop in a Mission Impossible pose, or maybe they stood on each other’s shoulders to reach over the fence? Either way, the top of the trellis is now blocked with wire from the stairs side, as well, but I gave up any hope of having control of this situation, unsure of what other ingenuity these rabbits would use to get what they want.
It didn’t take long to find out. I have a 3 x 3 foot raised garden bed that is surrounded by chicken wire, and I planted it as a cut flower garden this year so I can enjoy dainty little bouquets of sweet peas, Queen Anne’s lace, snowballs, and cosmos every day, with the prospect of zinnias and dahlias still to come. I went outside one recent morning to do some weeding, and heard a rustle from within the patch. Thinking it was probably a chipmunk, I took a closer look. I ducked down, and saw a teeny baby rabbit munching away on a zinnia plant. As a few choice words burst out of my mouth, I climbed around and found that there was a small opening in the chicken wire, where he must have gotten in, but he was scared and couldn’t remember how to get back out. I didn’t want him to be trapped in an all-you-can-eat buffet while he devised an escape route, so I stretched out the opening, went and got a broom from inside, and ushered his furry behind out, closing up the opening with some twine. He scampered off to plan his next meal.
Well, scaring the baby of the family was the last straw for Mama Rabbit. She is a tough customer, knocking over many a container of plants to get a better angle to access the best parts of her meal, and she is not scared of us one bit. She granted us an audience that evening as my husband and I were outside enjoying an after-dinner fire pit. She perched regally, about 10 feet away from a roaring fire, two humans, and a dog. She wasn’t worried about any noise we were making, and we could almost see her calculating that she could outrun the dog if we let it off leash. We stared at each other, and I got the distinct impression that she was putting me on notice of a performance improvement plan: leave my babies alone or I will eat every last plant that you dragged home from the garden center today, and for heaven’s sake, stop putting fences around the delicious produce. Do better, or I will find another Head Gardener.
And off she went.
As I have written about before, noticing details and striving to find the humor or the beauty in them has been an important tool for finding balance and gratitude, whether at work or in my personal life. I have certainly experienced a lot of frustration (and wasted money!) in my ongoing garden battle with the rabbits, but I started having a lot more fun with the situation once I started imagining the story from the rabbits’ point of view. The plants are still getting eaten, but how I perceived the rabbits’ ongoing feasting changed (at least, most days). This is a lesson that I need to keep re-learning over and over again: you can’t always control what happens to you, but the story you tell yourself can change how you experience those events. And just maybe it will give you a good story to tell in a presentation or out on a walk with a friend.
Thanks for this beautifully written story from the rabbits perspective. I needed to hear this today. ;-)
What a lovely update on a great topic - changing perspective to enjoy what you cannot control. That said, there is also wonderful humor in the "battle" you outline, which some of us are similarly losing on a daily basis. That does not stop us from trying again - which just makes the interaction with the bunnies more challenging and the need to further adjust our point of view :)!