Rabbits – Flower Garden Foes

Many people may view rabbits as cute and cuddly creatures. But ask a gardener how they feel about rabbits and you’ll get a totally different answer. Rabbits will destroy your entire garden over night, and eat almost anything right down to the soil. As opposed to birds or other garden pests that are fine with sharing, the rabbits eat it all and leave nothing for you, the gardener. But I digress.

Throughout the handful of places I’ve lived, none have had the rabbit population of my current home on South Mountain. They must be reproducing.. like rabbits..

Instead I decided to wrap my vegetable garden with chicken wire, and plant flowers that the rabbits wouldn’t eat. I’ll talk about the chicken wire later, but for now I’d like to discuss the flower garden.

I prefer to purchase all my plants from the clearance rack at Lowe’s. It affords me the opportunity to resurrect a dying plant, and create unique and unexpected combinations. In addition, the varieties of plants allowed me to determine what was palatable to the pesky rabbits.

Although I struggled with it initially, lavender has proven to be rabbit proof. I got an incredible score of four different varieties from the Lowe’s clearance rack, and the rabbits have ignored them all. I wish I had labeled them, because now I don’t know which are which. Regardless, they’re all still alive and smell amazing at the entrance to my home.

Vincas have also been a rock solid choice. They’ve continuously bloomed and exploded with grown, despite the 110+ Phoenix temperatures. Again, the rabbits have been disinterested.

Lastly is this little bush.. thing. It’s actually a lantana (Miss Huff, I believe). I got it on the clearance rack at Lowe’s as well, but you’d never know by looking at it now. As an added bonus, I have an almost constant stream of hummingbirds visiting it in the morning. I can’t wait to see how large it gets in the coming years.

Importantly, rabbits will seem to eat anything that is a small seedling. I started my flower garden with mostly seeds. However as soon as they came up, they were gone almost instantly. You’ll notice my flower garden with circles of chicken and rabbit wire. This is to protect the seedlings until, hopefully, they’re large enough that the rabbits aren’t interested.

What have you grown that the rabbits ignore? Let me know in the comments!