Deer would eat the leaves/buds, not dig in the dirt. They might disrupt the ground around the rose with their hooves, but not that much.

Maybe voles?

Bunnies have razor sharp teeth--wish my pruners always cut that cleanly.

My deer eat flower buds. They have no incisors (sp?) so they make rough tears in the stems, not clean cuts. Voles eat the roots off underground and the plant falls over. You would see a tunnel leading to the rose under the mulch. Voles love deep mulch. I would doubt a five year old would go after thorny flowers with that vigor.

We just had a smaller rabbit get into our backyard and it munched one smaller rose bush completely to ground level. Evil varmint! lol But, the soil was not disturbed.
You may have something like a Vole creating problems as
buford suggested or it may have been human or another animal. Hard to really tell.
Hopefully nothing else happens.

Do you have groundhogs, squirrels or skunks? Groundhogs will go for bulbs or roots; squirrels go for nuts or will bury things; skunks dig for grubs. No comment on what human beings are capable of.

Dogs? Especially if you had bone meal below the bush...dogs like to dig for it.

Hi Laura-
I agree with the dog suggestion. There's a Lab across the street from me who escaped his house twice...both times they caught him in my yard trying to dig the roses at the roots.
-Maeve

AHA!!!! Yes, bone meal under the mulch. I'm laughing at the lab comment right now. There's a particularly feisty one named Hershey 2 doors down, who moonlights as an escape artist.

My doggie is fenced into her own backyard & can't get near this particular bush. There's also a little demon dachsund next door, and she gets out of her fence constantly. Maybe I'll start leaving my dog in the house with the windows open so that she can woof at trespassers.

Thanks!

Awhile back I planted some new roses and put Fish Meal in the holes.... they were all dug up by either a coon or a possum.... I'll never do that again !.sally

Hi Laura,

How upsetting! I know how this feels! It happens here all the time. My husband, who knows a lot about animal behavior, is certain that the racoons are the ones doing it, though we have also had possums in our yard a few times. Squirrels do a lot of digging around here too, but they don't completely uproot plants and pull them out of their planting holes.

If you use bone meal, make sure it is very far down in the planting hole, and then don't ever add any bonemeal on the top. Racoons love that stuff and they can sniff it out a good many inches down in the ground. They also love fish emulsion. We'd love to be able to use it, but using fish emulsion guarantees that the plant will get dug up by an animal looking for the source of the smell.

In one new planter, we ended up putting some large-mesh chicken wire on the ground, nearly flat but humped up a bit to provide unpleasant walking for the racoon and unproductive digging. This has helped, but you need to come close to covering every square inch around the plant to have it work totally. Where the pieces of chicken wire don't overlap to cover every inch of ground, we've still had a bit of digging, though those spots aren't right next to the plant, so we've at least stopped the uprooting and digging where it's needed most.

We must have gotten some of the bone meal too close to the top of the ground in that new planter this spring; we've had the new roses planted there this spring repeatedly and completely dug up, sometimes with an uprooted plant moved over and left laying on its side, root balls exposed to the sunshine. That was the situation until we resorted to trying the chicken wire idea.

I remember once listening to a story on the humorous radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, featuring someone sitting out in his yard all night with a shotgun, waiting for his racoon to show up. It was quite funny, and I could just imagine the kinds of exasperating circumstances suggesting the story line to the storyteller. I think we have lots of company in our upset with the plant diggers!

Best wishes,
Mary

Thanks, Mary!
Most of my roses are in the fenced-in backyard & protected by both the fence and my humongous dog. Puppy chases out any intruders, so everything in the backyard is just peachy. I have 4 roses in the ground in an open bed against the house in the front yard, and that's where my damage occured. Puppy probably saw it all happening & went nuts, not being able to get out of her own yard to fend off the intruder.

I had planned to add about 10 roses next year in the front yard, since that's where I have the best open space with full sun. This may not work now. Wondering if Liquid Fence might be effective? I have used Deer & Rabbit repellent before with great results, but the smell is so putrid that I may as well not even bother growing roses. Smelled like a corpse rotting in the front yard.

The use of 0-46-0 will serve the same purpose as bone meal without the dust or attraction to animals. If you use it for the calcium, there are amendments containing calcium that you can sub for bonemeal such as crushed egg shells.

Thanks, Karl---
I just started a compost pile & we eat lots of eggs. I've been throwing the egg shells out there faithfully. Cool thing is that the neighbors are getting in on it as well, and adding their items to the heap. I should have some yummy, yummy stuff come next spring for my new beds, and enough to share with the neighbors if they need some, too.

I agree with Karl (as usual).

I stopped using bone meal back when we had the mad cow scare, and switched to triple superphosphate 0-45-0 when planting roses.

It provides the nutrient without attracting our neighborhood dogs or cats.

I want to add that I'm happy to hear about your compost pile!

I have had two similar instances this year. Today I went out and found five new buds on a Julia Child Rose, on the ground around the rose and one rose bud chewed up about 5 feet away from the pot. Not one bud left on the plant. I think it is a chipmunk doing it.

The other instance was a plant that was dug and pulled right out of the hole. I don't use bonemeal and used nothing when I planted a new small Buddleia. The plant had only been in the ground about 3 weeks so the roots were not established. But it was out of the hole. Mulch was piled up as if something had been digging. The plant was just sitting on the ground about a foot away from the hole it was planted in. It was in the night that it happened. So I was wondering if it could be a skunk?

Hi Laura,

I was trying to remember whether we tried Liquid Fence there or not, so I asked my husband. He thinks we probably didn't try it, as, as he believes the non-vegetarian racoons would probably find the stinky rotten egg smell attractive, the same way they like Fish emulsion. But we've not tried it, so I can't say for certain that it wouldn't work.

You can use bone meal successfully, Laura. You just have to keep it at the bottom of the planting hole, not up, say, to within 6 or 8 inches of the top. We put a lot at the very bottom of all of our holes and have only had the digging problem with the one new planter where I think we added some a little closer to the top.

Compost ought to work out really well for your roses and anything else you want to grow wherever you want to put it--in the holes and on top too. You don't have to go the extra step to make compost tea and carry around that heavy water if you don't want to; if you just scatter it on top of the mulch when it rains off and on, the compost will gradually dissolve into the ground and the plants will be able to gradually use its nutrients that way just fine. (Note: this method depends on leaving your mulch in place on top of the ground, and replenishing it with more mulch on top of that as it becomes necessary. The partially depleted mulch contains the nitrogen the new mulch will need to begin the breakdown process all over again without having to take much from the soil to accomplish that.)

I'd not personally recommend the use of non-organic fertilizers, as their use changes the natural balance of the soil's microbia. Plants have evolved over the centuries to coexist with and benefit from the naturally-occurring soil organisms, not a soil whose microbia have become wildy unbalanced. I briefly used superphosphate (in the Dark Ages) on my rhododendrons until reading a research-based article about the long-range unhealthy soil effects of using superphosphate.

Plants will be much healthier in the long run if you can use only organic fertilizers like compost. To take for example the plants we've had the longest experience with, our rhododendrons absolutely love cottonseed meal, judging from their generous, gorgeous blooming on reasonably healthy plants (with no spray at all) for the past 35 years. We haven't used regular commercial fertilizers of any kind anywhere in our yard, including superphosphate, for all that time. We just throw cottonseed meal out on top of the mulch and let it get washed down into the soil with the rain. It gradually decomposes, consistently furnishing its nutrients to the rhododendrons.

In noticing our large healthy rhododendrons, surprised people around here have said that they can't grow rhododendrons in their own yards, including even some landscapers who ought to know how to grow them. But the key is in the soil health and that's the difference in what we do compared to what they tried that didn't work. Organically based stuff is all you ever need to successfully grow rhododendrons; anything else, like commercial regular fertilizers, sets the plant up for diseases to a much more crippling extent than it would likely have had to deal with in a natural setting.

Since starting with roses, we've put lots of good organic stuff into the planting holes, but cottonseed meal and banana peels are the main thing they'll ever get on the top, other than tree leaves and mulch. It seems to work well for roses thus far; our roses were heavily budded up this spring and looking quite healthy until Rose Rosette Disease swept through the yard.

Regarding your dog, well, if he/she starts barking wildly after dark, you might get out your flashlight and take a look in the front yard. We've done that a few times, and sure enough, there was a racoon. We gave up bothering to fuss at the racoon, though, since we noticed it had no effect whatsoever. They might saunter off a little, but as soon as you go back inside, they come right back. They don't seem to care the least bit what people think of their digging! Pesky little critters...

Well, good luck with your critters.

Best wishes,
Mary

Voles usually stay at least two inches down in the mulch but I have two cats that dig them out. I have a totally fenced in animal proof garden that keeps out everything including rabbits, skunks and even coons but I still get digging. The cats love it in there and do their share of digging but something else gets in as well. Birds are attracted to the pond and dig but they are not the answer. It's a mystery.

Well, since repairing the damage about a week ago & adding more earth around the base of the plant, I haven't noticed any more digging. I also didn't use anything to deter animals. I know we have possums, deer, rabbits, and racoons. Last week my DH saw a young coyote run between our fence & the church behind us. That was a bit weird.

I guess I can tolerate a little investigative digging as long as I don't see gnawing on the main canes. I do currently have a problem with bunnies digging holes in the backyard....but that's just in the grass, which is under the jurisdiction of the DH.
---Laura

We recently had a rabbit chew one of our smaller roses completely to ground level.
So, I had to put fencing around some of the other roses until I can rabbit proof our perimeter fencing better.
I also spread cat urine smell around from our litter boxes.

We also had to get rid of some Voles this season. In Pa. we are not allowed to live trap and move Voles to another area.
So, I had to take the other route. I watched a YOU TUBE video on the subject and copied that with great success.

We have a night vision security camera, which we have used on occasions to identify problems.
Easier to find a solution to a problem if one knows what is causing the problem.