Cool, Ingrid. I hope your protection works. We're not bothered by rabbits (and I refuse to believe that our beautiful wild hares do harm in the garden), but oh, the devastation wrought by porcupines and deer. I think that if someone offered me venison, I'd eat it.

Gosh, I hope it will really WILL work ,Ingrid! It sounds very promising,and hopefully you'll also continue to get rain,so the poor critters will have options outside of your garden as well.

I am so happy that everything works out. You will have best of both worlds .I bet this was such a relief !
Now, you can enjoy your roses , companion plants and wild life in peace . Lots of pics of all the roses and I can't wait to see your bunnies too.
jin.

It's great that you are coming to terms with your situation and finding solutions. Good luck for a great growing season this year. I look forward to seeing the new plants and flowers (and maybe some photos of wildlife)!

I'm so happy for you Ingrid. I love the way you wrote about them. So beautiful! So very sweet of you to take the time to love all of nature, not just some of it. You are a inspiration!

Ingrid, that is profoundly beautiful!! I’m so happy that your whole “family” can coexist in your garden, and this is very inspiring to the gardening community as a whole. I could really do better in this with my squirrels...I’m afraid I’ve got a few issues with squirrels based on past disagreements. But I will try to adopt this same spirit. :-)

Very well written, Ingrid! I try and be in harmony with the wildlife here. I've planted a lot of native trees, shrubs & plants to benefit the insects & critters. I have trees that produce food for wildlife but also look beautiful. I just wish that they would leave the berries on for a week so that I could enjoy how pretty it looks, if only for a brief time! We have a lot of rabbits here, they tend to eat my roses in the winter months but not too much in the warmer months. Typically I see them feeding on clover & grasses once the weather changes. And the rose canes they eat usually get killed back by winter. So really the bunnies help with pruning! Sometimes the rabbits, squirrels & chipmunk snip off buds & blooms. But now that my plants are bigger & I have a lot of them, it's not the end of the world. The only critters that really irk me are voles & japanese beetles. The voles I do not like because over winter they can destroy a whole root system & I can lose plants. The japanese beetles are foreign & have no enemies to offset their destruction. But I'm sure you know about those because it's a topic that many of us have posted about here. I've also recently discovered another problem here, which are iris borers. They attack my bearded irises. There are things I can do to prevent it. But as I do not spray, it will probably mean I will succumb to replacing with another easier care plant. There is always something in the garden that can be discouraging, but sometimes it's easier to live with nature than fight it.

Ingrid, I love your philosophy if you cant beat them, feed them. I love that the critters are so brave in your presence. But, your protecive fence sounds perfect and you have offered an alternative food source and made some new critter friends as well

What a lovely post, Ingrid. You are the better person. I get my Gopher Hawk in the mail today.

Sheila, I'm not the better person, believe me. I don't tolerate gophers because they don't stop to chat before they eat the roots off a rose, but strangely enough we have none, whereas in the past I had plenty of them. I have no idea why they have blessed me with their absence but long may it continue.

Melissa, you have some formidable animal challenges and I can only hope that the wolves that have begun to come back in Italy multiply enough to help you out. I don't imagine even they would be inclined to dispatch the porcupines, alas.

Thank you for all your sweet and kind comments. I'm so fortunate to have all of you as fellow travelers on this sometimes rocky path which however is filled with roses for those of us fortunate enough to include them in our lives and gardens.

Yes, I feel like a bit of a hypocrite! I love what you wrote Ingrid, and I couldn't agree more that bunnies are just the most darling, lovely little beings. I'm so happy mine are happy to eat my grass and have been leaving my roses alone, and I'm always delighted to see them hopping in the garden. Gophers or ground squirrels though, another story altogether. Although I know they are also cute as buttons, they are horribly invasive on my property, and not welcome. I have done nothing to get rid of them, choosing to cage my roses - but the holes the ground squirrels leave can be leg breakers for my horses, and I do not wish these creatures well... sigh...

Good luck Ingrid. My backyard is pretty much barricaded with chicken wire. It is unsightly but it had to be done. I used to have a big rabbit problem too.

Karen, I'd be terribly concerned about squirrels too if I had horses; I completely understand. We each have our own concerns, and there is no one right way to go through life. I do know that all of you here have heart, and are open to loving animals in addition to your roses.

Rabbit holes have caused serious injury to my sheep so I get rid of rabbits as often as possible. They are an invasive species here so we are obliged to eradicate them. We are in drought at the moment so they are competing with every other critter for food and water. I shoot them and put them on a tree stump for the brown falcons that live in the tree out the front of the house. The falcons then leave my ducks alone.

I have at least 20 wallabies at the house every night and they eat the food the ducks spill from their bowl. I leave water bowls everywhere for the native animals but the situation is so bad that

nocturnal animals are out in the daytime. I have one young wallaby that has taken over the ducks food and water bowls. I have to put little piles of duck food out for the ducks and let the wallaby have his fill. If he is still there at 10am I chase him back into the bush.

Lola, during our terrible drought of 2017 we had foxes hanging around the house in daylight, the only time I've ever seen that. They were looking for water, though also keeping an eye on the most recent kitten crop from our neighbors' farm cats. I'm sorry you're suffering from drought!

Ingrid, I did a bit of reading on porcupines, and found out that their chief enemies are foxes. I can't see a fox, or anything else, attacking an adult porcupine, so guess that they take the babies. I hope they will eventually reach equilibrium, and perhaps I'll be able to have at least a few irises and wild asparagus, and that the shade garden won't be regularly reduced to tatters by porcupine digging. There are poachers, too, as porcupines are protected--Heaven knows why--and apparently tasty.

Lola, I'm so sorry about your horrible drought situation. How kind of you to leave water for the wild animals. My heart goes out to all the animals that are facing increasingly severe weather extremes all over the world.

Melissa, the porcupines sound very destructive. I'm so sorry that they're wreaking such havoc in your garden. I truly miss the remontant irises that were such an ornament in my garden which the rabbits have decimated. I'm replacing them with plants that the rabbits don't like to eat, but really nothing can equal the beauty of irises. I just ordered eight new perennials today, mimulus in gold and white colors (monkey flowers), California white and yellow poppies (which Lisa recommended) and Salvia sclerea 'Piemont". These all require little water once they're established and I hope they'll make my garden more interesting. I very much enjoy the penstemons, salvia and milkweed I already have. A rose garden without companion plants is not to be thought of!

Ingrid I cannot wait to see if your fencing works. My fingers are crossed and I’m hoping for pictures:)

I'm very excited, oursteelers. Today I noticed that Rosette Delizy, Duchesse de Brabant and a few other roses had lots of tiny buds. The spring flush should be well underway by the end of April, and with all the rain we've been blessed with this winter it should be a very nice one.

I got a roll of 4 foot tall plastic fencing to put around the blueberries over winter to protect them from rabbits. The rabbits chewed holes through the bottom and then ate the blueberry bushes. The next year I first put a 2 foot high wire fence around the patch, then the tall plastic fence around that fence. The bunnies sat outside the fences looking unhappy, so they ate the bridal veil bushes & hydrangea. This winter the snow drifted over the top of the tall plastic fence so the bunnies hopped into the blueberry patch and ate all of the tallest bushes that weren't protected by snow cover. DH got rabbit food from the store mostly because we were feeling sorry for little Esther, last years surviving bunny from the litter birthed under the shed. They love it and stopped trying to eat the blueberries.

Althea, I know I shouldn't, but your description made me laugh. We try so hard and they still outwit us with their tiny brains. I can't really tell whether my plan is working since we've had a wet year and there's more for the bunnies to eat other than the garden. However, I have no doubt that if they get hungrier they'll eat what's poking out between the holes at the very least, or they might do what yours did and eat the plastic to get to the bushes. It's just a line of defense that will make it a bit more difficult for them and meanwhile at least some of the roses will have a chance to grow taller, out of their reach. It's an imperfect world and I will always have a very imperfect garden, but if I can reach some sort of detente with the furry ones, along with providing them with vittles that we buy for then, it will be good enough. Being able to see them cavort around the yard, with not much fear of us, is a gift also, almost as much as my roses are to me. It means even more to my non-gardening husband, and for that alone I'll put up with quite a bit of their shenanigans.

Ingrid, when you said your roses poke out through the holes in the fence, my first thought was that those parts will be eaten. Maybe they will leave yours alone. Bamboo plant stake poles make good fence posts if you want to add some distance around the perimeter of the rose. Dragonflies love to sit on the bamboo stakes. They look cool on them. I think it needs to be very cold and snowy before a bunny will chew through your fence, so you are likely safe. Their brains may be small. but they put them to good use!

I too enjoy having them around. Since it is warmer here and the snow is mostly gone, it's fun to watch as they pick out their favorite bits from their bowl of store bought food and leave the rest.

Lola, I think your wallabies are so cool! I wish we had those!

I can't imagine anything wanting to eat a porcupine. Makes me think of all those poor dogs brought into the vet clinic on the Dr Pol Show lol. Anyone watch that show?

We get foxes in the daytime sometimes but they are after chicken dinner.