Thanks y'all! I appreciate your sweet words :) I slapped Mr. Bunny down there in time for Easter and thought I'd move him to the back garden afterward but you're right, he looks far too cute there to leave. I've got a thing for concrete statuary so I try to discipline myself by limiting their use to one per bed :) I do like the annuals idea a lot but water in the heat of our Georgia summer will definitely be a problem. That bed is the farthest from the hose and the hose doesn't reach all the way to the street. But I'll give it a think and see what I can come up with. Thanks for the suggestion :) Our mail lady drives nine hundred and forty two miles an hour down the street. Here's hoping she'll slow down to smell the roses! LOL Pine mulch is super cheap down here in Georgia so it's a pretty common mulch. But I do love how it looks too. Makes everything very tidy :)

I have a rubbermaid plastic box, but just replaced the plastic post and metal stake with a metal fence post. After about 5 years of being "kissed" by passing cars and trucks, the original metal stake was bent beyond repair. Surprisingly, the plastic mail box suffered no damage. Also, the rubbermaid set comes with a carriage bolt and nut to mount the plastic post to the metal stake. Mine rusted so bad it was impossible to remove (the carriage bolt just turned in the plastic with no way to grip it with vise grips). I'd use a hex head bolt instead.

Thanks all. sandyslopes - it never occurred to me that the green mailbox matched the storm door! That was a piece of luck. Yesterday when the mailman came and saw the mailbox cover for the first time I saw him smile.

Yep, local law enforcement is well aware of the problem. We also have a camera on the mailbox, but they generally come in the middle of the night, they don't get out of the car, they have something to obscure their faces, and they have their license plates blocked. Oh, and they try for foggy nights when possible. The result is that there's not a lot to go on. Even when police do succeed in catching them (by planting mail with trackers in the boxes), there's a new crew out there before long. And their new MO is to go through the mail as they drive, pick out the few things of value and immediately dump the rest on the road to avoid any potential trackers. After a break they've been back at it for a week, which the neighborhood presumes is because they're trying to get stimulus and unemployment checks; we wake up to mails strewn up and down the roads. Like chipsa, I live in an otherwise quite safe and low-crime area. Our location just seems to be particularly appealing for mail thieves - semi-rural, but 15 minutes to downtown, most houses set far back off the road with mailboxes on the road (so you can't see your mailbox from your house), pretty minimal traffic at night. We're hoping the new house will be slightly better, as the mailbox won't be on the main road but on a cul-de-sac (so no quick getaway) that isn't visible from the main road and is within sight of the other house on the street. We're also considering something like this: https://www.fortknoxmailbox.com/product/the-vacationer/ which is made locally and supposed to be just about as close to theft proof as you can get. It might be overkill, though.