While spreading mulch in the garden, I looked up and straight into the beady eyes of a giant spider.

I jumped back in surprise, but I promise I didn't run around screaming like a girl or flail at it with the garden rake. I simply backed off and left it to its happy hunting grounds.

It was the common garden spider, a black-and-yellow Arigope, hanging upside down, patiently waiting for dinner to fly into her large and rather haphazard-looking web.

Admittedly, a spider this size is scary looking, but oddly beautiful, too. They are harmless to humans but may bite if provoked. Experts say the bite is no worse than a bee sting. I'll take their word for it.

The coloring is great camouflage, allowing the spider to hide in plain sight. I didn't even notice the web that stretched from a "Bela Lugosi" daylily to a clump of black-eyed Susans.

She was a doozy, too. I'm guessing female because the female is larger than the male, which also is less vividly colored. The garden spider has a cinched-in waistline that Scarlet O'Hara would envy, with a small front section called the cephalothorax and an egg-shaped abdomen adorned with a black and yellow pattern.

Garden spider-watching is fascinating, too, because she's motionless until a hapless insect hits the web - in this case a fly - and suddenly she's on it, wrapping it in a cocoon before dining. It reminded me of the giant spider mummifying Frodo like a sausage in the Hobbit-in-a-blanket scene in the movie, "Return of the King."

The spider stayed in the same spot for several days. I was interested to read that the spiders eat their webs before moving to a new location. The female lays her eggs and keeps the egg sacs nearby in her web, protecting them until she dies at first frost.

News from the other side of the garden

At last count, I've lost six - count 'em, six - hostas.

Each morning, it seems, another hosta disappears. Utterly defoliated. Plucked clean.

No fungal disease or virus has afflicted these hostas, and it would take a slug the size of a cat to cause this kind of damage.

The culprit? Oryctolagus cuniculus, also known as rabbit.

Look up "gluttony" in the dictionary and you'll see the photograph of a bunny. Google "rabbit" and a photo probably will pop up of a rabbit eating hosta leaves in my yard. They're voracious about food and procreation, and as we all know, they procreate a lot. Otherwise I wouldn't be engaged in "Bunny Wars, Part Deux." Possibly, part trois.

Short of encircling the whole lot in chicken wire, my line of attack will be the same as ever … a hearty, regular spraying of Liquid Fence and letting lose the "hounds of war" - my dogs, Lucy and Andy. Fat lot of good they do, though. Lucy will walk right by a bunny munching in the yard, and a chipmunk or squirrel is Andy's quarry of choice.