Usually you see just the leaves eaten with the center vein visible on roses with rabbit damage. They don’t eat or gnaw on the canes & the damage will be visible on the rose as high as they can reach. They tend to not eat the leaves with any fungal disease (go figure). If you see bunnies, get some rabbit fencing (it doesn’t have to be very high). Lowe’s sells fencing that covers a variety of animals but use the part of the fencing that is an inch apart so you don’t get the baby bunnies squeezing in. You will need a wire cutter, some metal landscape fabric stakes & maybe a twist tie to join corners & longer pieces at the top. Here is a link: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Blue-Hawk-Actual-50-ft-x-2-3-ft-Rolled-wire-Galvanized-Welded-Wire-Rolled-Garden-Fencing/4780625

Rose - do you have a picture with your fence? I'm interested in what the green looks like. Jazzmom - thank you for the link to the Lowes fence. Thank you both for all this information!

Funny story — I also have a small 20 sq. ft. vegetable garden. I have 15” high fencing around that. I grow peppers in the summer. Anyway, one day I see all the leaves gone on one plant. Pepper still sitting on the plant. I couldn’t figure out what did this. So went inside to google pepper pest damage. I go outside again & there is a baby rabbit sitting next to the plant! It had squeezed through the fencing on the wide part. I quickly turned around all the wire fencing so the narrow edging was at ground level. The pepper plant survived to grow new leaves & give me a few more peppers. My rabbit fencing is behind scalloped red bricks & the fencing is at soil level. Never had a problem with them jumping inside my rose garden (a 20’ X 9’ rectangle). They do dig to get into my yard under the PVC fencing. Let me find a photo of the fencing. This is of my veggie garden taken this past May:

Below are some pictures of my rabbit fence zig-zaging around the garden. The wire hole is 1 x 1 inch large; since mine covers a large area, it needed to have staking every few feet or so to render the fence secure. Periodically you will see a strip of white on the stakes - that's just the sticky labels. The workers of my contractor should have removed them.

Here, the fence is in front of the munstead wood, turned left around and in front of my Julia Child, and then turned right and continued in front of the 4 Boleros. Noted the young boxwoods in front of the fence, which helped to cover the fence up (more so when they grow taller and wider). What's not obvious from this picture is that the fence is also behind the Anna's Promise (orange roses behind the fountain) and Ch'Ching (back yellow ones) in the back, but in front of the tall deer fence that dellimited my property from the wildness beyond.

This is a picture on the other side of the fountain. Here the rabbit fence is behind the orange lantana, wrapped around, turned left and continue behind the Ch'ching and Anna's Promise.

Here the fence continue on another side of the garden, behind my Firefighter and Princess Alex of Kent.

Here it continued behind my Dick Clark

Here the fence continues on another side of the garden behing my plantars and Easy Does it.

Here are some views of the fence some 10 - 15 feet away. Pictures taken today and it is really foggy and cloudy here in the Contra Costa County. Please excuse the poor quality photos.

I don't think the fence is very obvious from afar. However, I still have some 13 roses not within the fence. They are large size rose bushes, such as Teasing Georgia, which I also underplanted with other perennials, which "hide" the bottom part of the bush. For those I don't worry so much about rabbit eating a few leaves off the bottom of a 5 - 6 feet tall bush.

From other posts, I tend to remember Karen has a large property with many roses. If it is impractical to fence out all the valuable roses, maybe the priority are those that are currently affected by rabbits, those that are most valuable and cherished, or those that are newly planted. Newly planted roses are the most vulnerable to rabbit feasting on them - they may never grow and potentially can be killed by the critters.

All the material of the fences can be purchased from Home Depot, and you probably can construct the fence yourself. I have bad arthritis in my left shoulder and my husband is not very handy. That's why we had a contractor came and do it for us.

Rose - Contra Costa - aha, me too!!! Wow, your property is absolutely gorgeous!

My biggest concern is after the hard prune in January, all new growth will be in reach of the bunnies. I'm fine with bare knees once they've gotten some height.

Our first step was to put out game cameras, to see exactly what's happening (put up yesterday) since I haven't caught any of the bunnies in the act yet. I've been surprised not to see them during the day, but mostly in my headlights as I come down the driveway after dark, from work.

I do have a lot of different sections of roses. Provided the bunnies are nibbling, I might start with a repellant along with the cameras to see if it helps or not, and if not - then fencing it is.

My goodness we are neighbors! I always thought you are further interior to the east of Contra Costa.

Sounds like a good plan. I tried the spray first too. Bunnies love to come out at dawn, or at dust. If you have a chance, try to find them during day break. That's the time they love to come out. They also like over-cast weather.