Curiouser and curiouser. The camera footage of the bottom of the big sloping bed in the back garden showed absolutely nothing at all, except for a chicken. Otherwise a complete blank, no bunnies. So the back of the top of that border is a rabbit superhighway, then at the bottom of it there are no rabbits whatsoever. In between is a very solid wire netting fence that appears to be entirely rabbit proof. An Agatha Christie locked room murder mystery of rabbits.
So where do they come from and where are they going? We agreed that we must pursue a logical search pattern, and follow the rabbit activity from its last known position, rather than setting the camera at random here and there all over the back garden. The camera is now set on the fence a bit downhill of the previous night's sighting, as we try to follow them down the hill. They must be getting to the back of the top of the bed from somewhere, and when we can find out where it is we can block it up. Unless they are living in the garden.
There are no visible warren entrances. I've crawled over almost every inch of all the beds in the back garden, or at least peered into the recesses of the larger shrubs, generally in pursuit of bramble roots, and I haven't seen any signs of that much digging. There is always the nasty possibility they could have taken up residence under the rose bank. That would be a tough one. The bank is covered with Mypex fabric, which is in turn covered in a solid tangle of rambling roses and honeysuckle to a depth of between four and about ten feet. I have no idea how we would ever find even one entrance to a burrow under that lot, let alone several. Time for the Systems Administrator to spend some long summer evenings on a scaffold with some camouflage netting and an air rifle, if there are rabbits living among the roses. But with any luck it will not come to that. What we need now is information, but with only the one camera to track them it feels like a painfully slow process.
The roots of Penstemon grandiflorus surprised me as well. I dug up the first of my non-doing plants, expecting to drop it into the rubbish bin and chalk the attempt to grow it in that spot down to experience. Instead of finding a single woody rootstock as I was expecting for a Penstemon, I found it was made up of multiple shoots, each with its own shuttlecock shaped cluster of quite fleshy and not very branching roots. The clump started to come apart quite naturally in my hands, rather like dividing up a primrose, and I thought it had to be worth potting up the individual clumps and see how they did. While the article I'd read about Penstemon said they did not transplant well, these little individual shoots looked eminently pottable.
Time was getting on by then. I only dug the plant up at that moment because I was Strulching that part of the border while keeping an eye on the chickens, and I hadn't been expecting to find anything salvageable. I put the bits of root in a plastic bag, folded the end over and put it on top of the bucket of fish, blood and bone in the garage so that I'd be sure to find it the next day and so remember to pot it. Then I spent the morning clearing prunings out of the meadow and the wood, and only came upon the bag with the Penstemon in it after lunch. I was not so horrified by the delay as I would have been ten years ago, having seen how many days commercially supplied bare root plants for potting typically spend in their plastic bags before they are all potted up.
The pieces went into my new supply of 7cm square black pots, bought courtesy of Amazon after realising how useful the old ones left over from a consignment of alpines were, tucked away out of direct sun at the bottom of the greenhouse staging, and I wait to see what happens next. The same horrible stretch of soil that did for the Penstemon virtually killed some Campanula punctata 'Silver Bells', and the miserable fragments of root and shoot I salvaged last autumn from the wreckage are starting to throw up leaves and looking as though they might come to something, so I have hopes.
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