POST 23/2025 LAGRANGE COUNTY IN: Fast growing corn, haying with horses, scampering rabbits, an ostrich, neat gardens, Amish traveling in buggies and bikes, fireworks display, the early morning song of the Cardinal (Indiana’s state bird)–that’s what we saw and heard in the county next door last week.

Rabbits and other creatures in the wild

Peter Rabbit was a household pet in the home of Beatrix Potter. Potter was born in London in 1886. She wrote the Peter Rabbit story in a picture letter to the son of her last governess, later published as The Tale of Peter Rabbit. As one can imagine, Peter is the mischievous one among his siblings. “Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter . . . . lived with their mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree.”

One morning Mrs. Rabbit told her children to go out and play, “but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.” Peter never minding sets out on his own to gorge on lettuce, French beans, and radishes in Mr. McGregor’s garden. “And then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley.”

Luckily Peter escapes the misfortune that met his father, but not without some hair raising encounters with Mr. McGregor and the sickly state that set in from his overindulgence. Spoiler alert: Peter’s mother put him to bed with some chamomile tea while “Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.”

Marty and I and Linda, a friend from California, visited Hill Top, a farmhouse in the Lake District, in 1995. From the flyleaf: “She became a successful sheepfarmer and an active conservationist, working with the National Trust, an organization dedicated to the preservation of places of historic interest or natural beauty in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is very much thanks to Beatrix Potter’s efforts that so much of the Lake District is now in the care of the National Trust.”

I know people who are almost deathly set against rabbits. With good reason. They have flowerpots nibbled to the ground, vegetables picked over, damage done. I hope stories like The Tale of Peter Rabbit give some pause to being totally down on wild bunnies, rabbits and hares.

At Goshen Greencroft the resident gardens are well-fenced and dug below the surface to keep wildlife out. Nevertheless, the current issue concerns Japanese beetles. They are making a mess of garden plants, I’m told. I know they have been making a mess of the hibiscus bush in our flowerbed and also nibbling at the hydrangeas. We have been spraying them with Dawn dish soap diluted in water. They drop dead.

I think about Japanese beetles like some people think about rabbits. I can still smile about the creatures, though. One young one was brave enough to hide on my head and drop into the bowl of cereal I was preparing. Got it. Pinched it in a tissue. Chucked it. Chuckled a bit as I ate breakfast. The nerve.

Happy, healthy nibbles.

-John