Garden: How to stop rabbits eating your flowers

They might look cute but, for Agnes Stevenson, rabbits are the noisy neighbours laying waste to her most prized plants. So what’s the solution?

The rabbit problem that started a few months ago has now got out of hand and at times the garden resembles a scene from Watership Down.

From the kitchen window I can look out on baby rabbits nibbling daisies, while from the living room I get a good view of more in the back garden chewing on plants.

They hop across the front lawn, spring out of bushes, squeeze under the hedge and nibble on everything that I’ve nurtured from seed.

“You need a fruit cage,” Ken Cox, from Glendoick Nursery, advised me after I spent a considerable time complaining about the problem to him.

“That won’t just put a stop to the rabbits, but stop deer and pheasant predation as well.”

So far I’ve managed to protect most of the vegetables using chicken wire, but I can’t throw a net over the whole garden and the roses have fared worst, suffering severe defoliation and having the flower-heads bitten off just when the buds were on the point of opening.

The bush roses, which are mostly For Your Eyes Only, a variety that resembles a peachy, pink dog rose, have got off lightly but the new Eustacia Vye shrub roses have been ruined and I’ve now had to protect them with decorative wire frames that resemble the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

Fortunately nothing eats the Persicarias and at the moment their bottle-brush, pink flowers are a magnet for bees. The open flowers of the hardy geraniums and the bell-shaped flowers of the foxgloves that have popped up throughout the garden are equally as popular, showing clearly that simple blooms work best for pollinators.

Bees, butterflies, hover flies and even wasps are all welcome in my garden. However, I do draw a line at ticks. You find these mostly in long grass, so if you have a meadow area, keep an eye out and check pets frequently to make sure that they haven’t picked up any unwanted travellers.

The last time I got bitten by a tick I managed to remove it in its entirety, but I still had it checked by my GP to make sure that there would be no lingering problem.

Lyme disease, which can be contracted from infected ticks, is a nasty and debilitating illness and so it is best to wear trousers and long-sleeved tops when working in areas of long grass in order to reduce the chances of being bitten.

The prevalence of midges in our area is the reason why I don’t have a pond as being outdoors in the evenings would be impossible if we provided these flying pests with water but I’ve also noticed that they seem to congregate over certain plants more than others and in the past I’ve dug these up and moved them to provide us with some relief from the problem.