Garden Detective: getting rid of rabbits

DEAR SHERYL: Those small, adorable, rascally rabbits can decimate a garden faster than you can say "What's up, Doc?" And their favorite culinary indulgences include tulips, clematis, roses, blackberries, raspberries, apple trees, rhodendron, juniper, yews, grass, and, yes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage and most other vegetables. Although these are the preferred food groups, they're far from the only items on the menu. Unfortunately, if you're looking for a plant that is absolutely rabbit-proof, it doesn't exist.

There are several plants that rabbits are not likely to eat, but, like many humans, if a rabbit is hungry enough, it will eat anything. Plants that rabbits would rather not eat, however, include American boxwood, butterfly bush, forsythia, pieris, smokebush, witch hazel, viburnum, cleome and spirea.

So how does someone living in a rabbit-infested piece of Long Island suburbia successfully grow a garden? It isn't easy, as you've discovered. Repellents, like cayenne pepper, blood meal, bone meal, Liquid Fence and Messina Rabbit Stopper do offer some benefit and are worth a try. You'll just need to be diligent about reapplying, especially after rainfall. You might also try human hair stuffed into old nylon stockings and hung around the garden at rabbit-eye level.

If you don't have many rabbits, setting live traps around the garden would be another option, but then you'd have to figure out where to release them.

The most effective weapon against rabbit damage is a chicken-wire fence installed around garden beds. Nearly foolproof, a 30- to 36-inch fence with mesh openings of an inch or smaller is your best bet. Rabbits do like to dig, so the fence should penetrate 8 inches below the soil line. I understand you might consider such a fence aesthetically unpleasing, but it beats slaving over a hot pot of hasenpfeffer!

DEAR AUDREY: I know you've been seeing pansies growing in your neighbors' gardens for quite some time and have been wondering why I would advise you against planting your own. Pansies have sort of an upside-down lifespan: Instead of surviving over the summer from spring through fall, as most annuals do, their lifespan is from fall through spring. It's the heat of summer that kills them, not the winter cold.

The pansies growing around the neighborhood for the past month have been in the ground since autumn and are perfectly acclimated to the cool weather. The ones you buy today have been growing in a greenhouse and wouldn't have survived the outdoor weather a month ago.

Pansies you plant now will bloom throughout spring but then die during summer. The ones you plant in September will bloom twice: throughout autumn and again next spring.

After identifying a reader's mystery plant a few weeks ago as Platycodon grandiflorus, or balloon flower, several of you have written asking where they might be available for purchase locally. I've seen the plants, which are also sometimes called Chinese bellflower or Japanese bellflower, in some of the larger nurseries and garden centers in Nassau and Suffolk. Availability typically begins in spring.