<p>I have had a yellow Chinese Lantern plant along the western facing wrought iron gate for years. In fact, I have several as foundation plants because I love their year round blossoms that resemble tiny paper lanterns. It’s been a realtively normal summer for Zone 9 with only a few weeks over a hundred, typically suffocating as the rest of them here in SoCal. So I’ confused why this plant just up and shriveled up without warning.</p>
<p>I have been battling gophers for about a year now and finally chased them along the fence where they made camp under my yellow Chinese lantern plant. Foolishly, I thought I had won a major victory because they were confined to one area instead of chewing up my heat stressed lawn. So after coming from a weekend up north, I walked out back to a completely dead as a door nail plant. I’m not only stunned but heartbroken, especially since my lovely hummingbird-attractor, also covered a view NO ONE wants to see. Let’s just say it faces a pool owned by a male sunworshipper who can’t be bothered by pesky swimsuits. I’m so sad, don’t know what happened and wondering if I should’ve whackamoled that furry critter when I had a chance. Could a gopher bring down an 7 foot tall shrub? Confused near LA.</p>
<p>Yes. Those buggers are very very destructive and the only way to get rid of them is to kill them. I don’t like poisons because we once had a cat sickened by (we think) eating a gopher that was dying of poison.</p>
<p>We have gopher problems ourselves and have had success with the “gophinator”. The key is putting it into the opening of a fresh hole.</p>
<p>So it seems. Just talked to the gardener who took one look at my dead shrub and said, the “topo’s” got it. I’m mad but now I know how to say gopher in another language, so that’s good…I guess</p>
<p>That’s just so sad. I love flowers. I have gophers too. They ate all my daffodil bulbs. We can’t seem to keep up with them. Our gardener uses traps, not poison. We also have hunting cats and a gopher snake living in the yard. (At least I hope it’s still there.) </p>
<p>Yes - we live in the desert on the California coast. Lizards abound. This is not the place to live if you are afraid of reptiles.</p>
<p>Oh ya Photo, lizards, snakes and tarantulas. But the roadrunners tamp down the population. We had a rather extremely large roadrunner that knew that he could find some big juicy lizards that lived under the stump, formerly known as my Chinese lantern it’s like a little ecosystem is just gone overnight…</p>
<p>I have had good success using road flares, dropping a lit flare into a hole and then covering up the hole with dirt so the smoke doesn’t get out. I learned about flares one day from an older employee at a garden/hardware store who said they were formerly in the exterminator business. The flares line the tunnels with sulphur, so future gophers also stay away from these same tunnels.</p>
<p>@J hmmm sounds like a good plan, but I’m not comfortable with open flames when the other side of my fence is a dry hillside. The view from my family room of the choppers doing water drops a few years back was traumatic enough</p>
<p>SalveMater, here is a link. It includes a video about how to set it. My husband attaches a cord with a wooden stick to the end of it, leaving the cord trailing on the lawn, to make it easier to pull it out of the ground, because sometimes it gets moved away from the opening and is hard to find.</p>
<p>Ok thanks Calla, will check this out. I’m with you though, I try live with nature, I will go so far as trapping spiders upstairs and walk downstairs to release them outside. (Maybe I was a bug in my last life.) But I think I’m gonna hand over this prob to DH before the rest of the yard goes barren!</p>
<p>I hate gophers. They have killed a bunch of hardy plants in my garden. Mexican beach grass, geraniums, lilies. The only thing they haven’t destroyed is jade.</p>
<p>@Sam that’s awesome! That’s gotta be some CC history! And yes i share your hatred now, cannot believe they can take down bulbs, perennials and large shrubs! Again, I ask, what purpose do they serve!!</p>
<p>I’d imagine they are part of the food web, preyed upon by owls, snakes, foxes, hawks and other mid sized carnivores. </p>
<p>I do sympathize with your garden woes though. We had gophers in our CA yard and the holes were tripping hazards for the whole family too. Here we have voles and rabbits oh, and deer. Eek! My family jokingly refers to my garden as the deer buffet. I keep trying though.</p>
<p>Yesterday, my husband said there were soft spots on our lawn. Starting walking around, and sure enough, they were gopher tunnels. . </p>
<p>That part of our garden is zero scaped, with river rock, no grass. Each step we took collapsed down that tunnel. We felt a little triumphant. I am totally okay with this gopher’s demise. I just noticed 5 or 6 holes on next door neighbor’s lawn, too.</p>
<p>@Trill we have owls, snakes and hawks in abundance here, so if that’s the case, they’re all falling down on this one, and a lot of others from what it sounds like. I’m still grieving the loss of an entire wall of a flowering shrub that was dining for several hummingbirds and its blooms brought me such joy. </p>
<p>Gophers, I don’t see their value unless of course, you need humongous ariation tunnels in your soil. I would get a cat but the coyotes would see to that real quick…I’m thinking of paving it over and potting pygmy palms. Forget the ecosystem this is every man for himself!</p>
<p>Which reminds me, my sil broke her foot last year from a gopher hole! Pfft, over it!</p>
it’s like a little ecosystem is just gone overnight…</p>
no stomach for that</p>