This morning I laid on the grass path — the little bit of the lawn that remains — and watched the rabbit eat about four dollars’ worth of pink-flowering thyme in about three minutes. He is as lucky a rabbit as lives on the planet. We let him eat, for instance, the flowers we planted on Zeke. I thought of scolding him, and then realized Zeke’s reaction to the rabbit’s eating his flowers would have been one of delight. Besides, they do grow back. He has just this past week noticed the wooly thyme we planted between the flagstones three years ago, and he breaks off long stems of it and inhales them. A month ago I found a pot of lovage at a nursery and I planted it so that its roots would reach to about eight inches from Zeke’s face, which was after all where I got lovage from him in life, and yesterday I found it chewed off at ground level, a couple new leaves bravely emerging from the crown to face certain leporous death. I made a hat for it, a cone of hardware cloth stuck fast with a bamboo stake, and another for the bronze fennel nearby which was similarly afflicted. He ate about half the watercress yesterday, and a few facefuls of calendula petals. He is almost certainly delicious by now what with all the internal marination.
There is some stuff he will not eat. A nibble or two of the sage and he is sated, and that just with the generic English sage. The variegated and tricolor sages he leaves alone, so far, and the broad-leaved Berggarten is intact, which is good news for us: that’s the best variety for fried sage leaves. He has missed the nepitella somehow. He makes gigantic inroads into the nigella, which are regrown by the next day, but he leaves alone the oreganos. We have Greek, Cretan, and Syrian oregano, the “hot and spicy” cultivar and a creeping yellow variety, and wild marjoram grows wherever I fail to yank it out by the roots, and he leaves them all alone, but even the spiciest thyme he devours. He passes up the nasturtiums despite his fondness for watercress. The chives and Egyptian onions are safe, and I assume that means the elephant garlic now pushing pale green spears through the soil will be as well, though I have been proven wrong at least once before.
There is plenty there he does eat, and he samples each new plant in turn. The new herb garden has been a bonanza for him, in short, though he did also enjoy eating the lawn it replaced.
And I lie on the grass and watch him eat, though some of the plants he mangles I’ve searched for for years. I can’t help but indulge him. He is the first housemate I’ve had in decades who appreciates my gardening as thoroughly, as viscerally, as I do. He brings his own botanical taxonomy with him, one I am still trying to fathom. Most surprising of all, he seems… grateful, running up every five or ten minutes just to settle in next to me for a moment. Joy exists, and it turns out we can take in a large amount of it in small bites.
