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.

Not the colorado beetle

My poor new potatoes are suffering a nasty attack of early blight. Not quite as nasty as late blight, as the tubers don't seem to get particularly badly hit, though the top growth is looking decidedly anaemic, not to say acne-ridden.

But that's not what was worrying me this morning. As I bent to the fork to hoick the next lot of 'Foremost' into the colander I spotted this pair clamped to a leaf.

'Oh, my goodness,' I thought (or less printable words to that effect). 'I've got colorado beetle!'

This is one of the alien invaders that everyone's very, very nervous about. They skeletonise potato plants (and tomatoes, and aubergines): if you think blight is bad, it is as a minor sniffle compared to the colorado beetle.

The pest is established in France already: it can only be a matter of time before it skips the Channel. It's certainly notifiable.

Now, normally the internet has just one function in these circumstances: convincing you that the headache you've suffered from all day is not a hangover but a terminal brain tumour. For once, though, it served to calm an over-heated imagination and demonstrate that actually, what you've got is rather less alarming than what you thought you'd got.

So on my way to the Defra website to send a panicky email to the appropriate authorities I discovered that this is what a real colorado beetle larva looks like.

(Released under commons licence)
As you can see, nothing like my little fellas. However the question remains unsolved: they are ugly little blighters and keep reminding me of ticks with the way they're squat and tenacious and hold on with all their feet at the front. Here's another pic.



So - any ideas? What have I got here? And should I - as I suspect I should - be doing something about them? Answers on a postcard (or failing that, in the comments section) please...

Bzzzzzzz

Look what we found on our kitchen wall the other day.


Apologies for the quality of the picture, but if you've ever tried to take a photo of a fairly small insect while balancing on one foot on the kitchen sink you'll find fuzzy photos are hard to avoid.

This is a hornet, Vespa crabro, our largest social wasp. This is quite a little one, as it happens, though it's about twice the size of a regular wasp. And just look at that pointed nose: straight out of Bug's Life, don't you think?

I think we must have a hornet's nest not far away as we found a proper grown-up one of these buzzing extremely loudly and angrily against our skylights not so long ago as well. That one was seriously enormous: a good couple of inches from nose to tail.

Everyone I have mentioned this to has immediately gone into a 'don't panic!!' routine quite worthy of Lance Corporal Jack Jones. In fact, though, I think hornets suffer from a bad press. They are accused of everything from stinging people viciously with no provocation to ripping off the heads of poor innocent little bumblebees. Unfortunately for them, this is a recurring case of mistaken identity, with a good dollop of ignorance thrown in. This is a particular shame as they're actually quite rare, and what's more they eat loads of nasty garden pests - including aphids and caterpillars.

In fact, hornets will only sting when quite severely provoked: on the whole they are quite docile creatures. You're far more likely to be stung by a conventional wasp (which is a spiteful little creature much less deserving of sympathy).

And as for the ripping the heads off bees thing: that's not this hornet. That's the Asian hornet, Vespa velutina: and now that's an insect to strike fear into your very heart. Fortunately you're unlikely to see one in the very near future, as although they've made it to the south of France (where they are ripping the heads off honeybees even as I write, no doubt) they haven't - quite - made it here yet.

However, it is probably only a matter of time: the flood of insects arriving on our shores, largely hiding in imported plants arriving in our garden centres and therefore our gardens, is reaching plague proportions (step forward, citrus longhorn beetle, oak processionary moth, harlequin ladybird and the now ubiquitous lily beetle). They reckon we've got about 10 years before the Asian hornet arrives: when we, and no doubt their relatively harmless European cousins, should be afraid. Very afraid.