On Sunday evening, I noticed 3 twigs of chrysanthemum plant leaves laying haphazardly on the ground in my backyard, near my grill. "How did those get there?" I thought, as they were a good 10 to 15 feet away from the LARGE potted chrysanthemum plant Dr Desert Flower has near the outdoor fireplace in the backyard. I picked them up, examined the stems closely, and it looked distinctly as if a rodent had chewed them off, dragged them away... and then got distracted or detected or possibly had to evade being eaten by an owl or something else, and just dropped them in front of the grill. So I set them over onto a raised planter near the grill, and made a mental note: "On Monday, take these to the green trash can", since it was dusk and we've got an abundance of orb web weaving spiders and I really Really REALLY dislike walking into any spider web and getting it on my face, with or without a spider on the web.
To my surprise, this morning (Monday morning, 31 August as I write this), I went out into the backyard in full day light, to fetch the chewed off branches. They Were Gone. Only thing left was a sad, trodden, tiny fragment of one of the 3 branches. I was perplexed. Where did these large, sandal sized branches go? Then I remembered, we've got "citrus rats" (AKA Southern California rats that enjoy eating citrus... sounds better that way) and California Ground Squirrels. Both are about the size of a men's size 12 sneaker, and are large enough to set off wildlife cameras in the yard. The sadly squished single remanent was not much bigger than a sprig of parsley you might get at a restaurant, and obviously was not worth dragging away by the large nocturnal rodent who had gnawed off the other 3 branches.
Today, I tried to search for "chrysanthemum lined rat nests" and "+chrysanthemum rodent toxicity" and "+chrysanthemum +rat +nest". I have known that chrysanthemums are used in natural "green" pesticides along with rosemary and peppermint, as many insects abhor and avoid these plants for the scents and toxins carried within them. One time when we lived in South Carolina, I watched a Japanese beetle land on a marigold plant next to the driveway, take one bite, and fall over dead, instantly. A few weeks later, I saw the same thing happen to another beetle who landed on a chrysanthemum plant, chomped it, and rolled over onto the ground on its back, legs in the air, twitching momentarily, and then died. Granted, these were tiny insects, and dosage matters, so the rats (or perhaps squirrels?) won't die from nesting with chrysanthemum... but do they know the holistic benefits of having chrysanthemum lined nests to dissuade fleas and ticks from feeding on their children? "My momma taught me, when I was a little rat, to always line the nest with chrysanthemum, yes she did!"
Or were these rats voracious readers of Chinese studies of the effects of concentrated chrysanthemum extract on myocardial fibrosis in rats with renovascular hypertension?
I don't know for sure. There are so damn many H1B visa holders in Southern California that the rodents in my yard might have been participants in the aforementioned scientific studies for all I know? (taking away jobs and resources from Umerikun rodents! "Make 'Merica rat infested again!" [makes as much sense as Drumpf's inane con-man slogans that only the most gullible of American citizens embrace, hook, line, and sinker]).
All along the Southern side of my property there's a 6 ft high wall that separates my yard from the neighbor's, and it is covered in jasmine and mandevilla vines. My hypothesis is that there's a rat family living in the thick vines on top of the wall, and they wanted to help discourage parasites from living in their nest... or they're cardiac research scientist rats who are squatting without paying rent. Not sure - and no, I'm not the president of the USA in Idiocracy.
