Garden advice: Thorny problems

Those rampant rabbits

A plea for help from Somerset gardener Gaynor Tunbridge, who has alerted me to the fact that it is Rabbit Time again. As an "inner village" gardener I no longer have to fight the depressing fight against the nasty nibblers as I once did, but those poor souls that do have my sympathy.

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Gaynor is opening her garden for the National Garden Scheme later this spring to coincide with hellebore time and, for the first time ever, something - presumed by me to be a rabbit, despite the fact that they are not supposed to like hellebores - is demolishing the new juicy shoots as they appear.

And emailer Frank O'Mahony asks how he can protect his plants from rabbits that last year demolished, by his estimate, 75 per cent of his garden.

In very early spring, before the grass gets going, rabbits will have a go at almost anything, even plants they are not supposed to like, and physical barriers may be the only way to deal with the problem.

The only really successful, long-term solution to a rabbit infestation such as Frank's - a more-or-less permanent onslaught, by the sound of things - is to fence and gate off the whole area.

Fences can be made of chicken wire and, unless your local rabbits can jump (some do), need be no more than 1m/3ft high, with 30cm/1ft or so of wire buried horizontally under the ground on the outer side so that rabbits are put off trying to burrow underneath it.

The fences need not be unsightly if they can be disguised in boundary hedges. Obviously, the system only works if you make sure that the rabbits have been excluded from the site first and the gates are closed religiously each time.

This soon becomes second nature, and I managed seven rabbit-free years, living virtually under siege in the "smart" part of my garden, while allowing the rabbits free rein to tap-dance at will in the wilder parts. Trying to have decent borders or vegetables without the fences would have been pointless, and the one-off expense was certainly, in my view, worth every penny.

On a smaller scale, where a single rabbit may have wandered into the garden, possibly temporarily (as may be Gaynor's problem) you can protect individual herbaceous plants with bamboo cloches (from Harrod Horticultural: 0845 218 5301; www.harrodhorticultural.com) or chicken-wire "hats". I made fairly neat ones by using my salad spinner or a bucket as a mould for the wire.

Once shrubs are tall and woody enough, they can cope with having their lower shoots "pruned" by rabbits every year, but while they are small their bases should be protected with simple, sturdy, small-gauge chicken-wire cylinders. A rabbit trap might also be useful, or, dare I say it, a powerful air-gun, a good aim and a great deal of patience.

Are there plants that rabbits won't eat? In theory yes, and the RHS (www.rhs.org.uk) provides a helpful list of plants that are unpalatable to (or at least less-loved by) rabbits. I am reliably informed that, in my local rabbit-infested graveyard, the only plant that survives apart from grass is London pride (Saxifraga umbrosa).

In my experience, rabbits will have an experimental - and quite devastating - go at more or less anything if they are hungry enough. So let's keep our fingers crossed for Gaynor's hellebores.

Plantains on the lawn

I have plantains creeping into my lawn. What shall I do to get rid of them? The Roundup pack says that if you use it on the lawn you will lose the grass as well. Jill Kelbrick, Pickering

You are right about Roundup - and any other weedkiller containing glyphosate. Although it does not linger in the soil once it has done its job, it will kill grass and any other greenery that is inadvertently touched or sprayed with it.

However, unlike creeping buttercup, another pernicious lawn weed which really does "creep" via its runners, particularly in shady, damp lawns, plantains invade lawns by spreading their seed around. Their seedlings survive to maturity because their flat rosettes of leaves are left untouched by mower blades.

There are selective weedkillers that will kill the plantains without damaging the grass, but if the invasion is limited you could simply winkle them out individually with a pronged weeder or an old kitchen fork, or paint the large, flat leaves with Roundup mixed with a little wallpaper paste to make it stick.

From The Telegraph