My Garden Story

Rabbit Proofing?

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When I first moved to the Southern Highlands I don't remember many rabbits. I could look out of my bedroom window in the early dawn light and see one or two grazing peacefully on the lawn, but they disappeared during the daytime. Or at least I thought they did. I was largely unaware, not having a garden to worry about.

 

However, as the years went by and I started planting things I was dimly 

aware that some of them didn't seem to survive for long, but I put this down to my being an ignorant gardener.  It was probably Grant who pointed out another cause, when he planted fifty ranunculus and the moment that they were a couple of inches high they all went overnight. 'Bloody rabbits', said Grant. It was a spectacular loss,  and I thought back to other plants that were no more. I decided to try natives, thinking that they would be left alone as they had co-existed for so long. There was an excellent local native nursery so off I went, still ignorant, and bought things I liked the look of, Grevillia, bottle brush, kangaroo paws, and planted them, quite wrongly, mostly in the shade facing south. The kangaroo paws were the first to die, but rabbits couldn't be blamed because they were still all standing. The Grevillia struggled gamely, slowly dying back and never really flowering, and the bottle brush grew to a decent height, but I only discovered it was flowering at the very top, where I couldn't see, because it was in full sun. I had seen them in other people's gardens but hadn't noticed the aspect. I also think, now, that the soil here is a bit too rich. Too late, but a lesson learned.

 

The garden took shape; new beds were planted and the rabbit population swelled to plague proportions. Everyone was complaining about them. Whatever the Government approved control was it had failed, and the rabbits were now immune. Further, the Greens had managed to de-list some of the poisons used in the past and the CSIRO was no longer working on rabbit management. Shooting is not allowed in suburbia, dogs are too well-fed and very few seem to get run over by cars, though driving home at night hundreds run across the road in the headlights. Fencing?  Not the whole acre, and there is a council easement which has to be accessible to council. I thought of fencing one big bed and went to Bunnings to consult a fencing person. I found a man who had fenced his garden. It had to be tall chicken wire and dug in several feet deep, he said, otherwise they'll tunnel underneath it. I bought enough of what he suggested, and showed it to the gardener at the time, who looked horrified at the amount of digging required. Also, there had to be access to the plants which meant gates. 'What about a nice picket fence?' he said.  I thought about that, but realised it didn't go deep enough, so we tried the environmentally friendly solutions, garlic and chilli oils, applied directly to the precious things - waste of garlic and chilli. There are other sprays and people who claim to remove rabbits for you (they don't say how) but I think that would only work if the property was fenced. I planted rudbeckia, a big tough daisy I thought, but eight were eaten to the ground. At that point I was making notes of all the things the rabbits were destroying, and it was when an entire bed of little dahlias disappeared in two days that I really lost my temper.

 

I made a list of plants that rabbits had apparently avoided - too big, too poisonous, whatever, they were surviving, and I was amazed at how many there were. I consulted Malcolm and we thought a more relaxed approach to the garden would be good, less of the small annuals and more of the big stuff - landscaping in other words. I started with two miscanthus, having seen them in New Zealand, and they were quite spectacular. I noticed that they left roses alone, also iris, liliums, ginger, Gaura, alliums, salvia, hellebores, daffodils, geraniums, Bergenia. snowdrops, sanguisorba, thalictrum and Rozanne, the blue geranium that grows into beautiful mounds - though there is a query over that as I had three in the top bed and now there is only one. Heavens, I thought, if I can't made a decent garden out of that lot, there's something wrong. I'm still slightly holding my breath about peonies.  There's plenty to go on with and many of the above list are toxic to rabbits, as are little understory perennials,   lily-of-the-valley and miniature cyclamen.  I have a Siamese cat who does her bit, catching and eating baby rabbits in the season. For the rest, it's just nature where we are all doing our best to survive.

 

Bird damage is also severe but there's nothing to be done about white cockatoos who ringbark trees, pick fruit blossom and magnolias just for fun, and cut down daffodils laying them neatly on the lawn, rosellas eat fruit long before it ripens and break off all the new shoots on roses in the spring, its mischief and one has to live with it. I used to rush out waving my arms and shouting but the birds just flew to a nearby tree, waited until I had gone inside and resumed their destruction.

 

This brings me up to date, and therefore the end of my garden story. There won't be a fortnightly article, but I will post if something interesting occurs and always include my photos. 

 

Thank you for reading.

 

Jane Allen