Garden words: The January Review

Wicked Bugs

Amy Stewart

There are some books that just make you go 'Well. I never knew that.' And then there are books which make you say it over and over again, to the point where you start bringing up random facts in conversation with friends and family, just to get them out of your head, and when those facts happen to be about small and often fearsome things with a lot of legs your friends and family quickly start looking at you a teensy bit oddly.

Did you know, for example, that British diplomat Charles Stoddart was condemned to spend four years being eaten alive by blood-sucking assassin bugs while held captive in an Uzbek bug pit in the mid-19^th century?

Or that there is a caterpillar in south America so venomous that if you happen to tread on them barefoot you suffer massive internal bleeding and organ failure? Or that the crew who sailed to America with Christopher Columbus were driven so mad by the chigoe flea, which buries itself under a toenail and lives out its life there, that they cut off their own toes to get rid of it?

Nope, nor me.

You will have guessed by now that 'Wicked Bugs' isn't, strictly speaking, a gardening book, but since we gardeners spend such a lot of our time either encouraging in 'good' bugs (ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies) or murdering 'bad' ones (aphids, caterpillars, whitefly, slugs: the list goes on... and on...) then a book about them can only be endlessly fascinating.

There is a section on garden pests which is... well... almost as interesting as the ones about sailors and armies (did you know some used to throw clay pots full of scorpions at advancing Roman troops, circa 200AD, by the way?) though it does suffer a little from a sudden outbreak of advice-giving. I did think the bit about aphids was horrifying though: apparently one female aphid is born already containing within her the beginnings of a 'daughter' who is herself already pregnant with a third generation. Wow. That explains a lot.

Others, though, like the terrifyingly efficient Colorado potato beetle, are given a section all their own, so dreadful are they. The Germans thought the US Army was waging biological warfare by dropping Colorado beetles on their heads from planes during the Second World War, you know.

And so Amy Stewart gambols on through tales and titbits so surprising, arresting and downright gut-churning that I have been glued to this book ever since I started on page one. I love her obvious delight in her subject and her ability to tell a good yarn; she has a talent for winkling out little snippets of unfeasibly extraordinary information and using it to grab you by the ears. I just wish I knew how she finds out this stuff.

Little niggles: this is an unremittingly American book, to which you have to adjust yourself and stop chuntering about early on. Sometimes that's a good thing: I've always loved the American ability to find an original turn of phrase (no clichés here).

But there's a general assumption that the reader's attention is wandering off all the time (surely impossible given the content of almost every page), so we've got silly little 'pull-quote' things repeating choice bits of a paragraph in a larger type, presumably to titivate the reader but which end up interrupting the flow. I trained myself to ignore them.

Otherwise, though, the book is a gorgeous little thing: I loved its styling as a battered field notebook, and the line drawings and etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs are simply exquisite and a master touch.

Amy already has a more plant-oriented book out, 'Wicked Plants', all about poisonous plants, and it's now on my must-have list. Incidentally. you can read a bit more about the book in Amy's own words on the BBC Gardening blog.

Oy! Gerroff me geraniums!

Would you just look at this?


This has been going on for a month now, and at first I put it down to a bit of frost damage - this is Geranium maderense, after all, I'm trying to coax it through the worst winter since I were a nipper, and despite the best efforts of my little fan heater it's still a bit parky in the greenhouse.

But then I arrive for a quick check round this morning and....


Now, I think to myself, if it weren't January and a foot deep in snow outside and minus 7 at night and generally BLOODY COLD I'd think that was caterpillar damage.

Nah.....

Oh yes it is. A closer inspection revealed a small but nonetheless inescapably green caterpillar munching away at my geraniums. Not just this one but also the overwintering pelargoniums which are losing their leaves not through the usual culprits of downy mildew plus a touch of the chills, but blimmin' cabbage white caterpillars. In winter! In a seriously cold, frosty winter!

With a yelp of horror and outrage I'm afraid I chucked the culprit out of the door into the snow in a fit of vindictiveness and it was pounced upon by the chicken so I don't have photographic proof, and you'll just have to take my word for it. A good hunt through has not revealed another one.... yet. But my dander is now up (whatever is a dander, do you think?) and I shall be inspecting with an eagle eye every morning from now on. I also crushed a couple of sleepy aphids and a blackfly while on patrol, so clearly letting your guard down on pest control isn't on the cards even in this weather. Is there no rest, I ask you?

Incidentally in case you're wondering what cabbage whites are doing eating geraniums: if they can't find cabbages then pelargoniums and geraniums are fair game for all the brassica caterpillars as I discovered a couple of years ago when a big brown caterpillar eating a client's pelargoniums was a cabbage moth caterpillar. So pelargoniums taste like cabbages. Apparently.

And here's a bit of advice: don't grow calabrese in your greenhouse. Even if you've grown too many seedlings, can't bear to throw them away and it's the only place you've got left. Especially in a record-breaking caterpillar year.

Harrumph.

There's an elephant in my garden

Look what we found crawling across our lawn today.

Isn't he extraordinary? He stayed just like this, reared up like some prehistoric mini-dinosaur, no doubt in an attempt to make us fear for our lives. He needn't have worried - we certainly weren't about to eat him.

Fortunately, given his size (about the thickness of my ring finger and almost as long) he's not a garden pest. I discovered from the outstandingly good identification site UK Moths that he's an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar, and eats rosebay willowherb - which, owing to the fact that I'm seriously behind on the weeding at the moment, I happen to have a patch of at the end of one of my borders. So off he went to feast on my weeds till he turns into a lovely big moth with pink-striped wings. Who knows - if he finds another big pink-winged moth I might I no longer have a willowherb problem. Now that would be a result.

It's a cabbage moth!

Remember those caterpillars I found on my client's pelargoniums?

Well - thank you to all who replied. Plant Mad Nige offered a tentative ID as an Angle Shades Moth - but here's the pic of their caterpillars from the RHS's advice sheet on the subject:

(image: Tim Sandall).

Not really very similar to my little critter:

But enter the RHS's Principal Entomologist (no less), A J Halstead, who suggests my little friend is a rather more humbly-named Cabbage Moth - aka Mamestra brassicae. I looked this up on UK Moths - and sure enough:

(picture (c) Dave Griffin)

I think we have our culprit. Sadly he is a culprit, too - the moth is described as a "notorious pest" on UK Moth's info page on the subject, scoffing not only all members of the brassica family but clearly pelargoniums too.

Still - I love solving a good mystery. Now I have to go murder a lot of rather pretty caterpillars...

Mystery caterpillar

Can anyone identify this little chap?

One of my clients asked me to have a look at some bedding she had in her front garden, which she thought had been clobbered by slugs. The odd thing was, it was mostly pelargoniums, which in my experience aren't that tasty to slugs so generally don't suffer much damage.

It was pretty clear as soon as I looked at them that this wasn't slug damage - no slime marks, and the holes were large and in the centre of the leaf - not like slugs at all, which usually attack the edges of leaves first and then if they are going to eat the centre of the leaf, they kind of scrape away a thin layer to begin with rather than eat it straight through all at once.

Anyway - it was all screaming caterpillar to me, so I hunted around for a bit and sure enough this is what I came up with. Trouble is, I have no idea what it might be - I'm not exactly an entomologist and my garden experience with caterpillars is limited to gooseberry sawfly and cabbage white butterfly caterpillars, both of which I can identify at a hundred paces and despatch accordingly.

I'm a bit concerned though that this little chap might be something interesting. I had a look on the pragmatically-named What's This Caterpillar website but despite a happy hour browsing their gorgeously illustrated plates couldn't come up with a conclusive ident - the closest I got was the unfeasibly rare Orache Moth.

Thinking it rather unlikely that we've turned up the kind of thing you send to the Natural History Museum, I sent these pics in to Wisley's advice centre to see what their bug people can come up with. But if there's anyone out there who's looking at this and thinking to themselves, "Doesn't she realise that's a pelargonium leaf-stripper?" please don't hesitate to enlighten me! Until then, we're holding off the spraying/squashing/nematode treatments in the assumption that it's innocent until proven guilty.