A Rascally Rabbit

Or Was It Gary?

Our garden is held in a dynamic tension between domestication and wildness. Over the past ten years, I have encouraged a wild garden to take shape. There are many benefits to this approach, but sometimes wildness gets out of hand. 

I am currently dealing with an outrageous rabbit. He appears to be vindictive and very determined. We have been in a battle of wits for weeks, and the rabbit is winning. 

The presence of rabbits in our garden is cyclical; we had an uneventful spring. They didn’t cause many problems, but then, starting in June, they took up residence near our garden. I first noticed rabbit browsing when I came out to admire our beautifully tended carrot patch only to find half of it missing, clipped off in the night. Initially, I felt a wave of anger sweep over me, and I had thoughts about the various nefarious ways you can deal with rabbits. But, this passed and ultimately I thought, why turn sour when I can choose to look for sweetness? 

“Be a fool! Drunk on love, soaked in awe, till dry reeds are sweet as sugarcane.”

Rumi

I took up the challenge of finding balance with chicken wire. My son and I worked together to put up fencing around all the beds with tender plants that rabbits like to eat. We admired our handiwork and slept a little better that night. Unfortunately, the rabbit was not to be denied his dinner. Our fencing seemed to prompt him to pull two of our first ripe Cherokee purple tomatoes off a plant and eat about 25% of them. Our desire for a ripe tomato from the garden was at its annual peak, but he deftly sliced through our hope with sharp incisors.

Now my son was fully engaged. He loves tomatoes, and he recognized the gravity of the situation. So we started to have a rabbit briefing every morning, which made for direct, funny, and meaningful conversation.  

At this point, we knew we were up against a formidable foe, a truly rascally rabbit. Things were getting serious. 

“Whatever the ways of the world, what fruits do you bring?” 

Rumi

We immediately wrapped our tomato plants in chicken wire, taking great satisfaction in this decisive move. The next morning we were greeted with long bare stalks of Fordhook Giant Swiss chard one bed over. The plants were mature and about 4 feet tall. This is not normally the kind of plant you would expect a rabbit to eat, but he had stripped the leaves off of several stalks. I thought we had frustrated him, and he took it out on the nearest vegetation.  

We fenced off the chard only to then have him switch to eating the nearby okra. He left large ragged fragments of leaves scattered around the okra plants. I suspected that okra is not a preferred food and this was another frustration feeding. 

I took a chance and left the okra unfenced, and the next morning we discovered that he had hopped past the okra and found the green beans on our trellis. Things got ugly. Rabbits love beans, and they mow them to the ground. I did not have enough chicken wire to protect the beans, so I thought of them as a sacrificial plant at this point—a sacrifice to the rabbit gods. Every morning when I walked through the garden, there were fewer leaves on the beans. I had made my peace with this dynamic, but then, he made another bold move. 

I walked down the garden path and glanced into a fenced-off bed that I presumed was safe and noticed right away that the parsley was gone, the cilantro was gone and the endive was gone. He had dug a hole under the fence and wreaked havoc. 

I was deeply discouraged by this turn of events, but I kept walking. When I left the war zone behind I paused and laughed to myself. I realized that in the grand scheme of things, this is mostly funny, and it’s giving me and my son something to bond over as we discussed our rabbit strategy and how we could outsmart the little bugger. 

We got out giant staples and stapled the fence down to see if that would help. In my younger days, I would’ve more decisive action and this rabbit would’ve been dispatched. But now that I have embraced Buddhism wholeheartedly, I cannot bring myself to take another life for a few vegetables, so the saga continues.

On a recent early morning walk in the garden, I was in for another surprise. The uber rabbit we had conjured in our minds turned out to be a groundhog. Let’s call him Gary. Gary is big and hungry and even more of a challenge than a rabbit. This makes sense, now that I look back on the entire string of events. Rabbits do not normally eat tomatoes, but groundhogs do. Rabbits also do not pull down big plants and consume entire leaves at once. Groundhogs do.

We had been getting clear signals that this was a groundhog all along, but my mind was not open to them. I am used to seeing groundhogs or finding their burrows if they are around. It turns out that this guy had dug a burrow under our 250-gallon rain barrel nearby, where he was surrounded by thick cover. This chance encounter with a large, gambling, dark brown garden monster has raised the stakes. Rabbits are one thing, but groundhogs and gardens do not mix well if you like to harvest what you plant. 

I thought about befriending Gary and setting up photo shoots with him, but our garden is too important to us, so he has to go. We work with a wildlife removal company in these situations, and they use live traps to catch and remove animals that we cannot accommodate. It is an unpleasant but necessary choice. If we leave Gary in place, there will likely be an entire family here in the spring. 

Gary can eat ¾ of a pound of vegetables in a day, so a family of six groundhogs would consume 4.5 pounds of vegetables a day. That is a lot of vegetables! 

Speaking of vegetables, I just walked out into the garden to harvest eggplant for dinner, and I noticed Gary sleeping in the sun in a patch of clover. I could see his brown body glistening in the sun, rising and falling with each breath. His dark eyes were watching me as I slowly moved closer behind the cover of the tomatoes. He seemed curious. I watched him lay his head down on the ground and slowly blink. He was in a Cherokee Purple haze, his gut busy fermenting tomatoes and garden greens. I imagined him basking in the delight of being a connoisseur in paradise. Seeing him blink suddenly made me sense his presence as a fellow traveler in this wild ride we call life.  He seemed so peaceful. I am grateful that such miraculous creatures exist. 

Gary basking in the sun

Gary the hungry muncher showed off his incisors while partially obscured by a red amaranth stalk that he bent down and defoliated.

“A barren moon shines.

A sour world smiles.

What do I know but the light shining down?”

Rumi

I want to live in a bubble of coherency, where compassion, empathy, dignity, and reverence for life are the norm. I want to model this for my kids whenever possible, but sometimes life gets complicated and you cannot follow through with your best intentions. It is interesting to reflect on this dynamic with life in general. To reconsider how we interact with people and the land, and all the times you can choose whether to act on frustration versus taking more time to reflect, slow down, and choose a higher path, a path with more compassion and empathy. We all need to take this road more often. To travel on new neural pathways that reinforce our higher nature. However, there will be times when we exert our dominance and need for control. The challenge is finding balance. 

If I am honest, our encounter with Gary has made our lives more interesting. He gave us a valuable lesson in compassion and thoughtful decision-making.

“You're immersed in the unfathomable,

And you see nothing but yourself.

Be amazed.

Look how lucky the desert is,

A clear sky above an emptiness below

Love travels, end to end,

On every wind.”

Rumi

Gary is just doing what groundhogs do; sensing the nutritional value of different plants, and selecting what he needs to optimize his health. He does a much better job of this than most people and we should all learn from him and follow suit. 

“... one essence, one intelligence thrust us into one curved cosmos. Where the soul counts one, the mind insists on two. Five senses, six directions – drop the lot.

Leap forth. Let oneness pull you closer and draw you in.

There you are a gold mine, not just a nugget of gold.”

Rumi.

Gary has given us a gift. Repeated episodes of being brought into the moment where we see life as it is, free from distractions and false constructs. 

“Say, earth and sky fall to idolatry –

All of us on our knees

Worshiping figurines

Where is the idol,

noble and clever enough

to break the spell?

Say, scorpions, thorns, and snakes overrun the world.

Even so,

You are brimming with joy

Where is your garden?

Take us to the flowers.”

Rumi

The quotes in this essay are from a remarkable new book of Rumi poems entitled Gold by Haleh Liza Gafori