R-e-v-e-n-g-e!
This is gardener’s smuggery:
hoorah of zinnia frillery
despite cotton-tailed skullduggery.
(Apologies to Aretha.)
Yes, dear reader, this is that poor chomped zinnia that I mourned a while back. It recovered and set itself to showing those rabbits a thing or two about resolve. I might not have the zinnia patch I’d planned and dreamed of last March, but I sure got a brilliant pink sneer at the rabbits.
Sic transit…
Yes, this is the zinnia you met in my last post.
Does one zinnia a summer make?
This is my one and only zinnia flower. The seedlings that lived with me in the kitchen months ago, transplanted into the garden where they would be the yippee colors of summer, were almost all destroyed by the rabbits. Except for a few which I triaged into pots and then transplanted yet again, desperate for them to make a showing.
The results:
And one flower.
I plant tomatoes to remember Grandpa Mauck, moss roses to remember Grandma O’Hern, and marigolds to remember Dad. Mom is in the whole garden. So, as all gardeners know, the garden is not just expensive, it’s personal. The rabbits tried to take it all from me, and right now on this planet every loss is part of a huge rolling snowball of loss — and helplessness.
If there’s anything I hate, it’s feeling helpless. Life demands at times that we resign ourselves to it, but I can get pretty mad about that. I have lived to wage war this summer. I have potted and repotted and have fought the good fight with Irish Spring soap, rubbing it on flowerpots and shaving it around plants. And I have installed rose canes, which do seem to have some persuasive powers.
I have ultimately saved a small garden corner where my one surviving clump of gaura now thrives, the rabbit-scorned geraniums blaze away, and, in sheer defiance, some marigolds and salvia, once tattered, bloom insanely. Several of those triaged potted things have made a brilliant, if root-bound, showing.
I salute Farmer McGregor, the Grand Pooh-Bah of Rabbit Rage. I aspire to his greatness.
Those Olympians of digestion,
with their steely eating power,
the rabbits made me go next door
to borrow a cup of flower.
My next-door neighbor’s floofy Rose of Sharon.
The rabbits can’t reach these.
No doubt they will evolve soon with giraffe necks.
The eye of the hare,
what jaundice hue,
therein hinted
a whole world view,
carrot-tinted,
gluttonous gleam,
taking measure
in pound and ream,
spying greens
and petals fair —
what was planted
no longer there.
A lesson life
has clearly taught:
know when your efforts
come to naught;
to try again is
laudable habit,
but not when competing
with the rabbit.
Let it go,
it wasn’t to be;
the garden this year
is plant cemetery.
Alas, dear reader, it seems not to be a year for a garden. Moss roses, daisies, marigolds, gauras, zinnias, lantana, even spiny rudbeckia — chomped. Dill? Parsley? In my dreams! What with the rabbits devouring my flowers and the cicadas dive-bombing me, I think this might be the summer I stay inside and clean my house. OK, you’re right: that’s not likely. But still I’m steamed.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg and to sculptor Jürgen Goetz, and to the rabbit that posed for Dürer’s drawing, thereby giving Goetz inspiration for his sculpture, glowering near Dürer’s house in Nürnberg. The gnarled hand under the hare is obviously the defeated gardener.
I’m so little I can hide me
among the garden rocks,
I’m as welcome as a locust
and cute as chickenpox.
I wear a soft and furry coat
with cottontail behind,
but my heart is solid porcine
my ancestors all swine.
Chorus: Oh, engorgement!
I’m happy to my toes!
I’m coming for your garden
with a clover on my nose!
To be sung to the tune of “Oh, Susannah.”
With apologies for the foggy look:
I had to finagle a shot through the Venetian blinds again.
A tidy pile of four
arranged in order of size
morphs into a Babel
right before my eyes.
How do such things happen?
Is it among books’ habits
to grow all willy-nilly
and reproduce like rabbits?
Nemesis: Goddess of Divine Retribution
Vengefulness her main attribution.
My wicked ways put me on the hook
for a plague of ears with a “who, me?” look?
The tulips languish, sodden,
(those not by rabbit eaten)
jonquils merely leaf
cold-weary, winter-beaten.
A miser’s hand apportions
the flowering of this spring
there’s scant delight in the meadow
and nary a daffy-down-dilling.
But from windless cozy house
a trumpeting four-in-one
sings out to the colorless garden:
“I’ll show you how it’s done!”
It quadruple megaphones
“You can be like me, yay, verily!”
the concerted garden response
comes back somewhat raspberrily.
With thanks and apologies to Shakespeare.
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!
That, as you may remember, was my mother’s incantation on the first of every month. I’m not sure why except for the twelve rabbits’ feet involved.
I am not enamored of rabbits, as you know if you’ve read my blog for a while. They are the garden’s Visigoths and nothing can withstand their onslaught. Here, in the wee hours of one winter morning, by the light of the lamppost, I spotted one of their kind. It was huge. And obviously reconnoitering. Duly noted, you furry pig!
I am equally not enamored of Canadian geese, as you also know from my blog. They, however, are enamored of this retention pond. Why Mother Nature, who came up with the song of the lark and the wren, invented the honk of the goose is explainable only in terms of her caustic sense of humor.
Then, of course, the ants. Oh, they keep on a-comin’. At first in my desk. Now along the baseboard and up through the furnace vent in the dining room. Yesterday I was out in the cold mud dousing the side of my new house with Home Defense. In January? Really?
Having lived in California, I know about ants, which there put earthquakes to shame in terms of intimidation. They come like an undertow and pull you to your knees.
But this is Indiana, which, though definitely ant-ridden, usually doesn’t let the little rotters out mid-winter.
And have you ever noticed how observing ants can make you itch?
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, dear reader!
Oddments 