A big, fat rabbit dug a nest underneath one of my front-yard rose bushes.
When Mrs. Bunny isn’t anxiously watching over that nest from several feet away, she happily devours my perennials. It gives me fits because I specifically planted a hybrid echinacea (coneflower) in the front yard this spring to AVOID rabbits since they usually don’t bother the plants in my front yard.
When I saw a photo of Echinacea ‘Leilani” in bloom, I just had to have it. Native coneflowers are pink, but for years now hybridizers have been busy breeding plants in shades of red, orange and yellow. ‘Leilani’ has golden-yellow flowers:
‘Leilani’ grows 36 to 40 inches tall, but it has an upright habit and doesn’t need staking.
I haven’t had much luck in the past with hybrid coneflowers. Some haven’t survived our harsh winters. The ones that do are usually cut down by rabbits in the spring and never fully recover enough to show off. I’m hoping ‘Leilani’ will be the exception.
So far, so good. Mrs. Bunny has sampled just about everything in my flowerbed EXCEPT ‘Leilani’.