Something has been eating the flower buds of my hellebores. I was picking up dead hydrangea leaves from around them as I tidied the bed by the ditch, and cutting off any blackened and unhealthy looking hellebore leaves, when I found the mangled remains of petals on the ground. On first seeing a damaged flower shoot I thought I must have inadvertently trodden on the crown of the plant, but I soon realised that there was much too much damage for that (besides which, I am generally fairly careful where I put my feet and I didn't think I had stepped on them). The pink and white fragments were in little piles, and I am pretty sure that rodents were the culprits. I found the entrances to burrows among the plants, and as I knelt scooping up leaves and ruined flowers, I put weight on my left hand and the ground crumbled beneath it. I temporarily wondered if pheasants were to blame, as they will eat flowers, but given the remains of the buds were piled under the hydrangea leaves it clearly wasn't them.
I felt rather stricken with disappointment, though not yet crushed. Stuff happens when gardening, and plants that you like and were looking forward to have off years. I don't know if the loss of their buds at an early stage before the flowers were pollinated and started to set seed will trigger the plants to make more buds, or if hellebore metabolism doesn't work like that and I've had my lot, or rather the rodents have. It will be interesting, in a purely scientific way, to see what happens next.
Then I felt irritated that with five cats on the payroll, plus Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat having the run of the garden, my flowers should suffer in this way. The sad truth is that the cats are quite useless as rodent operatives, preferring to spend their evenings in front of the fire. Or at least, the boys sit with us by whatever fire we've got lit at the time. The two females don't often bother, the grey tabby spending her time in the hall and the fat indignant tabby in whichever room we're not in, away from it all.
I considered my options. I could sigh and take it lying down. That was an option, although not a palatable one. Using poison in the open garden was not an option. I have in desperation resorted to it under cover, in sheds, but not outside. We have a thriving owl population, not to mention the cats. I couldn't risk them eating poisoned rodents. Research by The Barn Owl Trust shows that 40% of dead barn owls brought in to them contained some rat or mouse poison. That's not to say rodenticide was the immediate cause of death, since many barn owls are killed in collisions with road traffic, but it can't be good for their health having poison in their systems. The blue poison pellets were out.
That left trapping. The manager uses mousetraps at work in the polytunnels. Small rodents will unearth and eat bulbs in pots, and gnaw off the bark at the base of shrubs, and cause a great deal of damage. One of our suppliers lost a substantial part of an entire crop of daphnes, when rodents got to work in the greenhouse. Trapping mice is not pleasant, but sometimes it has to be done. I called at B&Q, where I found various live-catch-and-release traps, and some traditional snap-and-kill ones. I went for the lethal variety. Live trapping, unless you are going to check your traps several times a day, seems to me very cruel indeed. I set one of the traps on the kitchen table, and cautiously triggered it with a pencil. It snapped shut with such ferocity that it leaped into the air. I found it deeply alarming. Still, it needs to be powerful to kill the mouse instantly. I baited my pair of traps with peanuts, set them, and carried them carefully down the garden. There I put them inside a length of drainpipe that the Systems Administrator conveniently had left over from some project, poking them well in with a stick. I don't want to risk catching birds, and indeed as it said on the mousetrap packaging it would be an offence to do so. Nor do I want them snapping shut on the foot of a passing cat.
I'll see how it goes. I may not catch anything, or the supply of hellebore-eating rodents in that part of the garden may be inexhaustible. It's nature red in tooth and claw. At least I am not yet as mad as Michael Pollan, who poured gasoline down a woodchuck's burrow and set fire to it.
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