Winter post-mortem and triage

Well, most the glaciers have retreated, and even the mid-week snowfall has melted, and it's getting easier to assess the damage and the cause.
Privet hedge - seriously wounded by bunnies; amputation recommended - recovery probable.
Plum yew (Cephalotaxus) - terminal, COD: cold.
Dwarf Japanese white pine - seriously wounded by cold; recovery in doubt.
Young hemlock (Tsuga) - terminally wounded by bunnies; no recovery possible.
Japanese umbrella pine (Scaidopitys) - older foliage damaged by cold; recovery likely.
Dwarf scotch pine - seriously wounded, 2/3s of crown removed by bunnies; recovery likely but it won't look the same.
Sedum ground cover has been nibbled to the ground by bunnies; full recovery anticipated.
Other shrubs will require more time before it can be determined what leaves out and where it leaves out.
That's the assessment at this time. Conifers really took a beating. Not everything is so grim. A clumping bamboo of doubtful hardiness appears to be quite alive probably due to snow cover. A young Helleborus foetidus of doubtful hardiness (winter cold killed a previous one) seems to be fine, and again the heavy snow cover may have helped. Otherwise the rest of the yards and gardens look like hell heavily littered by twigs and limbs, dead perennials, leaves, and wind-blown junk from who knows where. Clean up will take quite an effort.

Snow base makes higher trophic levels available

Along a portion of the Phactors' driveway is an old privet hedge. Because of limited options, snow shoveled out of the driveway ends up piled in the hedge, and with each successive snowfall, the base has been raised. This has worked out well for the bunnies, who when denied other sources of food turn to eating bark from shrubs and young trees . First they started out chewing the bark off stems near the base of the hedge, and as the snow has piled up higher, they have used the snow bank to move up the hedge to ever higher regions on the stems, now 2-3 feet above the ground level. A colleague asked if this was "bad" for the shrubs.  Duh-uh! When a bun-bun chews all the bark off a stem, the phloem and vascular cambium get eaten too, in fact this is probably the best part.  Completely girdled stems die above the damaged zone. What's been interesting is watching how the snow has given the bunnies access to parts of the hedge generally out of their reach. After each new addition to the snow bank, white, debarked portions appear higher in the hedge.  Mrs. Phactor has bought some hay to feed the bunnies figuring it might be less expensive in the long run to feed them hay than shrubbery. Rabbit damage to shrubbery on our campus has been extensive too, although almost no one notices.  Some of these shrubs will sprout new shoots from the base after the dead portions have been pruned away.

Rodents break probation - herbivore enforcement returns

For purposes of last week's garden tours, our most obtrusive plant cages were removed and hidden away.  The less obtrusive cages remained in place.  All the activity, the patio construction and the hundreds of visitors annoyed the resident woodchuck enough that they moved to green pastures.  The bun-buns and tree rats just stayed out of sight.  But presently the Phactors are feeling rather gullible because just because the tree rats and bun-buns didn't chew anything up for a few days, you right away fall into a complacency that is remarkably stupid.  Of course at times it matters not.  The dill remained fenced to protect all the seedlings, but they are gone, victims of a very small hungry bun-bun, one small enough to fit through the fence openings.  Next year we are upgrading our defensive perimeter with a critter border fence (did you get that NSA?) that has much smaller openings.  Among the bed of bellflowers the woodchuck neatly cropped, a new species (name somewhere in the records) re-appeared much to our surprise having narrowly survived a not only herbivory but a reduction in the bed size.  So now the exclusion cages are being repositioned.  It still raises a question about why a tropical bonsai bougainvillea was so attractive?  Perhaps a tree-rat keeps a life list of bark chewed off limbs.  Still our list of bun-bun favorites is showing its accuracy.  So the probationary period is over.  The rodents broke probation as we cynically knew they would, so it's back to caged plants as usual.  Things were going so well there for a few days.  Sigh.