the bunnies are back

I was suspicious the other day that the grass in the middle section of the top lawn, near the 'Tai Haku', looked shorter than the rest.  Was it merely that the soil wasn't as good there?  That stretch is never as damp as the area in front of the conservatory, which is particularly lush (by Essex standards.  This isn't great natural grass territory.  It was noticeable when the dairy company Robert Wiseman floated on the stock exchange in the 1990s that the maps showing the source of their raw milk put it all on the western side of the UK.  I digress).  But I wasn't sure that was the whole reason.

This morning, dragging lengths of sawn holly and birch up to the utility area for final reduction to firewood, wood chip mulch and bonfire material, I saw piles of rabbit pellets on the lawn.  That's what I was afraid of.  Rabbits are either coming in after dark for a free meal, or worse still living somewhere in the back garden, possibly in the rose bank.  The trouble is that we are now down to two elderly cats, who don't hang around the garden at night any more than I do.

We had the same problem last time round when the previous generation of cats aged.  At their peak a few years ago we had five large, fit, intimidating predatory beasts, four of which were good hunters, though thankfully only one was interested in song birds.  The fifth, the short indignant tabby, has never killed so much as a mouse so far as I know, but at least she looked and smelt like an active cat.  Nowadays she spends her days lying in front of the Aga or in the hall, going outside only for calls of nature.  True, Our Ginger caught a mouse this morning, and another one a couple of days ago, but he spends his evenings with us in front of the stove and by the morning he is wailing in the corridor for somebody to open the bedroom door and the party to start.  He might go out into the garden in the cold after we've gone to bed, persecuting the rabbits with the zeal of a Reformation iconoclast tearing down graven images, but I don't think so.

There's been digging in the drive along the Eleagnus hedge as well, and a little damage to the bark of one of the hollies in the bed by the entrance.  Realistically there is nothing to be done about it. The Systems Administrator can't be expected to lie in wait for hours after dark in this weather with an air rifle, and we can't inflict younger cats on the old ones.  We can't have a gate to keep the rabbits out at night unless we are prepared either to always go and open it before the postman arrives, which isn't going to happen, or install an automated one, which isn't going to happen either.  We looked at it briefly a long time ago, and as soon as we realised it meant installing armoured cable at a depth of two feet down the entire length of the drive we gave up on that idea. At least the garden is in a fairly mature phase at the moment, so I'm not doing any wholesale planting.  Rabbits always seem to make a special point of eating newly planted things, which are least able to withstand the damage.

Meanwhile, a crop of hopeful young shoots is springing up from the downhill side of the fallen birch's partially upended root plate.  A rash of foxgloves have sprung up in the ripped earth as well, and on the rotting parts of the stump.  It is going to be extremely pretty, come the summer, and I shall pile the last of the birch twigs around the regrowth to keep the rabbits and deer from grazing on it.  Looking at the amount of space that's opening up as I clear the brambles, I'm beginning to consider a new scheme, to rescue some of the cyclamen that have seeded themselves into the bottom lawn where they lead an uneasy coexistence with the lawnmower, and try them in the edge of the wood.  If they would seed themselves around the fringes of the hollies and the one rhododendron that would be quite something.  Under the canopy of rhododendrons is not generally a great planting spot, but this one is getting so tall it has abandoned most of its lower branches, and the ground isn't too dark and dry.  It wouldn't cost anything to experiment, apart from the opportunity cost of not using the cyclamen somewhere else, since they grew without any effort on my part and aren't a great deal of use in the lawn.