win some, lose some

Our Ginger caught a rabbit.  Oh, splendid and noble cat.  I was sitting in front of the stove yesterday evening, the Systems Administrator left the room to do something or other, and then the scrape and rattle of fire irons and sound of the front door being opened and shut told me that one of the cats had either been sick in the hall or Our Ginger had left a dead thing lying about.  The SA reappeared and reported that there had been a headless rabbit in the middle of the downstairs sitting room.  Fine and worthy cat, I salute you.  We can discount the short indignant tabby.  I have never seen her catch anything in her entire life, and I am sure she is not going to start now, seventeen this month, stone deaf, and thin as a rake.

My feeling of triumph was dampened this morning when I pulled up the bathroom blind and saw a small rabbit run across the lawn, and crushed when it hopped into the further rose bed and began to nibble on a patch of Viola cornuta which I've dosed with Grazers at least twice this spring.  No wonder it is not growing.  My disappointment was complete once I'd retrieved the wildlife camera from the bottom lawn, and found footage of not one but two rabbits foraging on plants in the ditch bed, which again has been treated recently with anti-rabbit spray.  Grazers is supposed to make herbage unpalatable to rabbits, but our rabbits evidently have no palates.  The photos were taken after the SA's discovery of the headless corpse, so I can't even comfort myself that the two rabbits might by now be down to one.  And the odds are fifty-fifty that they could be a he and a she, and we know where that will lead.

Meanwhile, either frost blasted the buds on Gladiolus tristis, or it flowered for about one day and I missed it.  When I looked at them hopefully yesterday morning to see if they were close to coming out they had turned brown and withered.  Whatever happened, I won't be getting flowers this year. Something went wrong, or else the photos of the clump flowering at Great Dixter were taken with precision timing.  My cold is back as well, after feeling almost better for a few days.