Oddments

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Tag Archives: Rabbits


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June 29.23: Coping, but barely

To be sung to the tune of

“My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” — with feeling:

 

A bunny is cute on a napkin,

winsome and snug on a card,

but bunnies tear my little garden

to pitiful flower graveyard.

Refrain: Rabbits, rabbits!

You cost me a bundle each year, each year!

Hie thee thither,

each cottontail and long ear!

 

Verse 2: Poor hapless forlorn pollinator

that searches for nectar and bliss,

no pollen to stick to his knickers,

no petal to tickle and kiss.

Refrain:  Rose canes, rose canes,

discreetly positioned, a rabbit fence!

Come, ye buzzers and swallowtails!

Rabbits, begone! Get thee hence!

 

In my last house, I had a gorgeous pollinator garden (header photo). Butterflies and bees held conventions there. Here, no hope. The rabbits devour buds, sprouts, petals. And want more. Always more. I am not a lawn person so I have all kinds of clover for them. It matters not.

Then there are chipmunks, digging and tearing through roots. I don’t care what Walt Disney says, they aren’t cute either.

I have wasted money on commercial “repellents.” My garden muse, Medusa McGregor, suggested rose canes one year, and I think she was on to something.

I hasten to add that there are some rabbits with manners; we had one once.

Here is evidence of how well the rose canes work:

This is the second round of buds on this poor coreopsis. The first round was destroyed.

Hasenpfeffer, anyone?

 


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October 13.21: Coping

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.


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August 14.21: Coping

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.

 


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June 15.21: Coping

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.

 


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June 2.21: Coping

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.

 


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Connections: April 25.18

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.

Connections