I gave the borders in the back garden another dose of Grazers this morning, trying to focus on what the rabbits seem to eat. They are very partial to violets and violas. My three Viola 'Grovemont Blue', a form of the long flowering V. cornuta in a lovely dusty soft blue, have been eaten to compact cushions with not the sniff of a flower in sight. The viola and low growing campanula in the rose bed at the top of the bank where the rabbits are living have likewise been nibbled to a non-flowering carpet, and where there should be a covering of sweet woodruff, Galium odoratum, there is simply nothing except the layer of Strulch. Rabbits have eaten it to ground level.
They are partial to geraniums, that is the true perennial geranium, not the tender pelargoniums that confusingly get called geraniums. Or at least they might eat them too, but they haven't had a chance as I haven't put any out yet. Some geraniums have been comprehensively defoliated and others not touched, yet, so I gave all I could see a precautionary spray. I've been spraying the hemerocallis, since back in the winter rabbits were eating the leaves, and while they've stopped doing that I don't want to find they've chewed out the developing buds.
They certainly eat Epimedium flowers. Most of my clumps have now managed to grow a fresh crop of leaves, both the deciduous forms and the evergreen ones I cut down in February, but I've had precious few flowers. It has definitely been a poor spring for Pulmonaria and Epimedium displays, and the geums I planted last summer are looking suspiciously stump-like where I suspect there should be buds by now. In the further rose bed a Cephalaria gigantea is half the size it should be, and an unusual small perennial flowering pea that was a present from a friend has been eaten to a tuft of stalks two inches high.
They don't seem to touch hellebores, though as voles eat the flower buds I'll be treating those with Grazers come the turn of the year, if I decide that it works. They haven't touched any kind of iris so far. The sweet rocket is running up unchecked, as are the foxgloves, but I'd expect that given they're poisonous. They don't seem interested in primroses (though something eats the flowers of the ones on the daffodil bank. I used to blame the birds, before deciding it was probably voles or mice). Various kinds of Dicentra and Thalictrum re unscathed. They don't seem to like any kind of Polygonatum, or Sanguisorba. In fact, given the choice there are quite a lot of things they haven't eaten, but I've missed the contribution of the ones they have.
It is still early to say how effective the treatment is. The pink flowered cow parsley relative I treated a few days is now managing to bloom, albeit at ankle height, after being grazed down just as it was on the cusp of flowering. I haven't noticed any further damage to the geraniums since the first treatment. As I sprayed this morning I tried to fix the size of various susceptible plants in my mind, so that I can check in a few days time whether they have managed to grow at all. I treated the tender pinky-bronze new leaves of the Mahonia japonica while I was at it, not as a defence against rabbits but in expectation of another visit by the muntjac. They had every flower bud out of that shrub a couple of years ago, and might find the young foliage palatable.
At least one rabbit will not be eating any more violets. The Systems Administrator disappeared back upstairs this morning after breakfast carrying the air gun, now fully calibrated, and took one out in a clean shot as it disported itself among the roses. It is a pity. I don't like killing things for the sake of it, but rabbits and gardens really don't mix. It should have stayed in the wood, or our neighbour's field, where it could have had all the grass and wild flowers that it liked.
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