A Bunny Thing Happened

In an attempt to work out how rabbits are getting into the salad patch to nibble the radicchio, John Lewis-Stempel solves the Walled Garden Mystery

- John Lewis-Stempel

I’VE come to think of it as the Walled Garden Mystery. For three nights now, rabbits have been gnawing their way through the salad patch until there’s scarcely a leaf of radicchio left. (Lepines, incidentally, seem immune to the attraction of rocket.)

The conundrum? How the rabbits get in. The brick walls are old, but 6ft high, the pedestrian door is varnish-blistered, but solid plank, and the galvanised field gate, the obvious point of entry, is sheeted in anti-rabbit wire mesh. Yesterday, I patrolled the outside walls, looking for tunnels in the manner of an especially diligent Colditz guard. For one tired moment, I paranoically imagined genetic-freak rabbits hopping over the walls.

This morning, as I surveyed the bone stumps of lettuce, I realised I was in a horror story, not a detective howdunnit; a garden time Stephen King, not an Agatha Christie. The rabbits were inside the walled garden. I’d locked them in on Tuesday evening after toing and froing through the field gate with the wheelbarrow when lifting the potatoes.

Sure enough, when I examined the ‘wildlife area’, it contained more fauna than intended. Such is our hubris: we want Nature, yet only where and when we want it.

The wildlife garden, a 10ft strip along the bottom wall, has the usual accoutrements to attract Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Buzzy Bee, a hibernaculum consisting of a half-buried sherry cask and a ‘hotel’ of racked hollow hogweed stems respectively. There is also a bat box and a bird box. The butterflies have a buddleia. For Gussie Fink-Nottle’s newts, it’s the land of milk and honey and des res: mini-pond (a disused water trough with a ladder of stones and filled with water milfoil), rock pile, log pile and long grass.