Be A Better Gardener: A New Perspective on Peter Rabbit

by Thomas Christopher

“Peter Rabbit Had It Coming.” That was the title I gave to a chapter about garden pest control in a book I wrote many years ago. In fact, even as a child I rooted for Peter’s adversary, Mr. McGregor. For those whose parents never read them Beatrix Potter’s classic children’s book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the story recounts a day in the life of a young cottontail. His mother warns Peter to stay away from Mr. McGregor’s garden – “Your Father had an accident there; he was put into a pie by Mrs. McGregor.” Peter, of course, pays no attention and has stuffed himself with Mr. McGregor’s vegetables before he is caught in the act and pursued by the infuriated gardener.

In the book, Peter eventually escapes more or less unscathed. The cottontails who have invaded my garden over the years were rarely so fortunate. Recently, though, I’ve had a change of heart. I’ve learned about the plight of the New England Cottontail, a species once abundant in the northeastern United States but now endangered throughout its former range. The natural history of this population decline makes a useful supplement to Beatrix Potter.

In large part, this is a story of changes in human management of the land. New England cottontails, like many other species of small animals and plants, flourish in the brushy thickets of young forest, woodland recovering from natural disturbance such as fire or human disturbance such as logging. The abandonment of farms across our region initially provided lots of new habitats as fields reverted to brush. As these overgrown fields developed into mature forests, and the local logging industry declined, habitat shrank. Fire suppression removed a prime source of natural disturbance, and the conversion of forest into housing developments since World War II posed a new threat by breaking the remaining woods up into isolated fragments often too small to support a healthy population of New England cottontails. Hunters began introducing a Midwestern rabbit species, the Eastern cottontail, as early as the turn of the 20th century, and they proved more successful at living around people. They multiplied rapidly and crowded the New England Cottontails out of much of their remaining territory.

I became aware of the New England Cottontail's plight through outreach from the state of Massachusetts, which had joined with its New England neighbors and the state of New York to create a recovery plan for the New England Cottontail in 2009. State foresters identified a couple of areas in our Berkshire woodlot as suitable for New England Cottontail habitat and worked with my wife and me to create two clearcuts that quickly developed into dense shrubland and native saplings.

Soon thereafter, a rabbit began to feed in my vegetable garden. Instead of reaching for my air rifle, I greeted this as a possible success. I say possible because I only got a quick glimpse of the rabbit and New England Cottontails closely resemble Eastern Cottontails. The New England Cottontail typically has a darker back than the Eastern Cottontail, a black spot between its ears, and shorter ears edged with black. The two species are similar enough, however, that wildlife biologists rely on a DNA analysis of the rabbits’ droppings to distinguish one from the other.

Why should you care, I suspect you are muttering, about some rare rabbit so similar to the species that is displacing it? As is commonly the case, the decline of one species is a warning sign of broader changes in the local wildlife. The habitat the New England Cottontail requires is also essential to dozens of other species of songbirds, reptiles, mammals, and rare plants.

I’ve barred rabbits of every kind from my vegetable garden by surrounding it with a woven wire fence whose bottom is buried in the ground. This has saved me from confrontations such as the ones Mr. McGregor endured and has promoted peaceful coexistence. This last is important as gardeners such as me move from our old role of monarchs of the landscape to a new one of stewards of our ecosystem.

For more information about New England Cottontail Rabbits and other wildlife dependent on young forest and shrubland habitat, visit the Young Forest & Shrubland website at https://youngforest.org/

Be-a-Better-Gardener is a community service of Berkshire Botanical Garden, located in Stockbridge, Mass. Its mission, to provide knowledge of gardening and the environment through a diverse range of classes and programs, informs and inspires thousands of students and visitors each year. Thomas Christopher is a volunteer at Berkshire Botanical Garden and is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including Nature into Art and The Gardens of Wave Hill (Timber Press, 2019). He is the 2021 Garden Club of America's National Medalist for Literature, a distinction reserved to recognize those who have left a profound and lasting impact on issues that are most important to the GCA. Christopher’s companion broadcast to this column, Growing Greener, streams on WESUFM.org, Pacifica Radio and NPR and is available at berkshirebotanical.org/growinggreener.