This is the story of a rabbit named Poppy and how she came to live with us on Schooner Creek.

One spring Mama seemed to need flowers everywhere around. She dug up the whole front yard and begged Papa to build her big boxes to plant things in. Papa made fancy boxes out of logs from the woods and Mama filled them with soil and peat moss and other things good for growing flowers. Then Mama started planting things. She planted herbs and bulbs and tiny shrubs, and all sorts of flowers. By summer there were blossoms and colors everywhere and Mama was very pleased and proud.

But Mama was not happy about the soil. Soil that lives in the forest isn’t much good for flowers and the soil needed help. Mama got some horse manure from the neighbor and spread that around. Then she got to thinking about livestock again, which everyone tried to discourage since the last time this meant goats eating the house and climbing on the cars. Pretty soon she was reading her rabbit books and dusting off feeders and such from the cellar.

Mama told us a rabbit would be perfect because it could eat up all the vegetable scraps that never seem to break down in the compost heap, and the rabbit poop would be great fertilizer for her gardens. We could hardly get by another day without one it seemed.

Today Mama arrived home with a huge bale of wood shavings, a twenty pound bag of rabbit feed and a tiny rabbit in a cardboard box. The rabbit is mostly white with dark grey patches here and there, and her ears flop down like she’s sad. For now she lives in the woodshed. I just hope the woodrat who lives there too doesn’t frighten her. Mama says her name is Poppy, which is one of Mama’s favorite flowers. So I guess Poppy belongs to the garden.