The Bright Green Beetle That Was a True Bug

I can’t believe it was last August when I last wrote – things went frantic with the jewellery of course – as soon as the kids are back at school and everyone’s hols are over, people start buying little treats to cheer themselves up … and thinking about Christmas! So I didn’t draw breath until early March.

Before the Autumn, I’d managed to do a bit of amateur pruning, jam a few cuttings of things that looked near death into some trays of garden soil, and pulled up some lumps of weed runners from under the gravel in the areas nearest the door, but that was about it. Needless to say I’ve been weeding, pruning, (and thankfully planting!) ever since. More anon.

Anyway, on to the interesting insect: yesterday night, the lack of light drove me in from the garden at about 11, and I flopped at the computer to ‘work’ (involving a lot of looking at plants and seeds), and this huge (ish) exotic-looking beetle fell off my arm on to the keyboard. It was bright green, with orangey-red markings, and looked like an animated fuchsia! I just stared at it as it crawled over my numpad, as the most striking thing was its shape – a sort of curved long triangle with curlicues; rather like a leaf, in fact.

Robert Brown Hawthorn Shieldbug

Image is a cropped version of ©Robert Brown’s vibrant photograph on trekearth.com of a Sheild Bug taken in Cumbria in 2004 – the only one that matched the colour of mine!

I vaguely remembered seeing a picture of it in a gardening book somewhere, under ‘Pests’, but I couldn’t bear to kill such an ‘un-British’ looking exotic. I pawed around for my camera, but of course the battery was dead, and as it was starting to flap around, I grabbed it in a handy tissue. It immediately started vibrating, so strongly I almost dropped it, but I raced for the the garden and got it out safely.

I was rather excited in a ‘I may have done something bad’ way, as I’d never seen one before, and wondered if it might be ‘reportable’ – that I’d unleashed a terrible horticutural plague or something. All searching for pictures of green beetles brought me lots of our standard brown n black things, with the odd metallic green small ones, until I happened upon a post somewhere of someone asking about a shield-shaped beetle he’d found. An insectoid expert from a ‘true bug’ website came to the rescue – turns out it was a Hawthorn Shieldbug. Not a beetle at all. I found there were two varieties; Birch and Hawthorn (the larger), and mine matched the measurements of the latter, although all but one (RobBrown’s) of the online pictures showed the markings as a sort of light brown.

The interesting bit (yes, I’m getting there), is that these are apparently now becoming rather scarce in Scotland. Evidently not in Edinburgh – perhaps they’ve decided, along with ‘Location, Location’, that it’s the best place to live in the UK.

Having also bagged two welterweight slugs today as well, I feel I have every right to be unbearably smug and sleep the sleep of the Just.

Cru
x

~*Text ©Cruel Lady 2009*~
http://www.redscorpiondesign.co.uk

Fixing the Cherry Tree – Fighting Bacterial Canker and Gummosis

Having made inroads into the weeds, it had vaguely registered that the flowering cherry tree, the centrepiece of the garden, wasn’t looking too well. It burst into bloom this Spring as usual, but it didn’t look quite as spectacular – not quite as ‘cherry blossom viewing’ – as the year before …

Now I could ’see the wood for the trees’ type-thang, there was a definite droop all round. Dead brown leaves hung from many branches instead of falling, green leaves didn’t look vigorous, and a detailed inspection revealed black swollen patches all over the place and a weird, sticky and revolting jelly-stuff clinging to stems and leaf junctions.

I solved the problem using a mixture of commonsense, and expertise from the BBC Lancashire site (thanks folks!):

As I dug out the huge tap roots of the weeds around it, it occurred that they must have been draining a lot of goodness from the soil, and that trimming off the ends of the worst affected branches might help too. I noticed as well that the rubber straps holding the trunk to its support appeared to be cutting in to the bark – I cut them off, praying that the tree wouldn’t keel over!

In need of guidance, I headed to Google, and came up with the excellent BBC Lancs Q&A – the problems listed seemed similar; apparently fruit trees, especially cherry and peach are prone to bacterial canker. Insect damage gives it an inroad/carrier, and once it’s in a tree’s system it can’t be cured, just managed. The horrid jelly was an airborne fungus, normally grey-green, but in my case amber-coloured, referred to as Gummosis, which seeks out breaches in a tree’s bark, especially those made by the canker.

I went back and had another look at the tree, and noticed splits in the bark on the older branches, now healed. It seemed my tree had been battling with this beast for a long time, and I felt rather indignant and angry. Some of the anger was with myself for ignoring the garden to the point that it’s focus was beginning to lose a long-term battle …

The Sages in Lancashire recommended cutting away diseased wood, which I’d done up to a point. But cutting it all away would leave me with a three-foot stump! So I decided to approach it more gently, giving the tree time to recover as we effected a cure. I gradually nibbled away the dangling browns and any new growth showing nastiness in the first week, and watered the outer area with some Bio plant feed I found in an old bottle in the cellar.

The gummosis continued to appear – it seems more virulent when the weather is warm and rainy. I lost my temper in the second week, and cut out the black canker on three of the large branches, down to the core of the stem, pouring boiling water over my knife as I went along. I dug out as much as I could, but noticed the black colour went right through the branch – rather like a childhood verruca – and that I’d have to hope the tree could fight that last bit.

The Sages recommended something called Arbex (or Arborex?) as a sealant, but I couldn’t find it locally and I was blowed if I was going to pay £4 for online delivery of a product that cost £3. So I got out my cigarette lighter and burned the cut areas, and noticed the horrid jelly made satisfying death pops when I experimented with the blue part of the flame. While these patches were cooling, I boiled a kettle and added that to a bowl which contained a splash of Tesco Antibacterial Handwash, and a squirt of Fairy Lime and Lemongrass washing up liquid (also antibacterial). I washed off all the jelly stuff and soaked any black canker areas using a cloth – my thinking being that the heat would kill the fungus, and the soap would kill the bacteria.

Once dry, I smeared the big cuts with Vaseline, (waterproof, neutral and petrol-based!), and retired to my Contemplation Chair for a cig.

A week later, and Mr.Tree is looking much happier: I did another feed using the the Bio bottle close to the trunk; and despite subtropical weather involving mist, rain and warmth (typical for the Edinburgh Festival!), the mere couple of yucky jelly blobs that popped up have been killed off before I’d had time to get out the soap-and-cloth solution. The big cuts seem to be healing too – rather than black canker, they’ve gone a chestnut brown, and the leaves further down the branches don’t seem affected.

This success has got me hooked – I find myself browsing seeds and plant pots online, when I’m supposed to be buying jewellery supplies. I have a creeping feeling that I’m going to become one of those Women With Trugs …

~*All images and text ©Cruel Lady*~
http://www.redscorpiondesign.co.uk

Reality Bites

Well, although I have a Master’s Degree in procrastination, I simply had to do something about the ivy/neighbour prob and decided to start small and work outward, so the task didn’t seem quite so overwhelming. Armed with the rusty secateurs and equally rusty hedge-lopping shears I found in the cellar, I climbed on to a wooden ladder I found quietly disintigrating in one corner of the Nightmare, and set-to with a will.

After half-an-hour, I’d found an abandoned, sealed bag of bark chips, a likewise forgotten tit’s nest, and the top of the garden wall. Hurrah! I also found some of the ‘vigorous growing thing’ hidden by the ivy curtain – familiar from previous overgrown courtyards. It’s evergreen, and is the sort of thing borough councils plant in supermarket islands and roundabouts – it has yellow flowers, and continually produces berries. I’ve encountered it all over Edinburgh, so if anyone knows what it’s called …

the growing thing

Anyway, I was soon crushed by my next-door-neighbour, who came out at the sound of activity, and pointed out that if I’d cut through the roots of the ivy, it would die and fall into her garden. She made it politely plain that this was inconvenient – I peeked at her tidy, well-manicured court whilst up on the wobbly ladder, so could understand this pov.

As I suspected, this is just the tip of a rather large, unruly iceberg; the next day my shoulders and arms had entirely frozen up from the violence needed to make my rusty tools work. I realised that money would have to be spent to replace them and prevent my early admission to the Royal Infirmary in the ‘dead spider’ position.

My victory over this small portion of the ivy is beginning to look distinctly Pyrrhic …

Cru x

~*All images and text ©P.L. Sharp 2008*~
http://www.redscorpiondesign.co.uk

‘ware Garden!

Well, I’ve been forced to take some time off from working t’ward becoming insanely rich ::snort :: to attend to the garden. Due primarily to the fact that a) my neighbour in the upper right flat can’t see through her window from the ivy and b) my landlord wants to inspect the premises and the garden is a jungle over which The Cat presides as both owner and King.

It has called to me; my maternal family, the Twells, are from rural Lincolnshire, and all have green fingers and that laudable British tendency to find contentment in small pleasures. However, my paternal family are Irish, and mad as a bucket of pink snails, so I get impatience, arrogance and obsessive-complusive leanings there – ‘ware garden!

I opened the back door – we often do this to let in some air – but a deep breath was required before opening the wrought ironwork gate immediately behind it, exposing the full horror of one-and-a-half-year’s neglect.

All I can say is that one has to admire plants as a kingdom. The garden was the feature that made me sign on the dotted line back in ‘06 – smack dab in the city centre, yet entirely screened from neighbours and office windows by high walls and ivy hedges – a tiny, secret jewel amongst many similar wee Edinburgh corners. Back then, it glared with modern polish – gravelled in terracotta chips, a weeping cherry as a centrepiece and chic aluminium furniture to finish. Oh, and an overhead halogen floodlight for pinning unwanted intruders to the spot – all it needed was a gun emplacement.

Now, it was literally a sea of green; weeds were even growing on the paving, using last Autumn’s unswept leaves as anchor. The ivy hedges (mainly consisting of hedera, I later discovered) were busily curving over and turning the whole space into a green cave. No wonder The Cat, having seen thirteen Summers and getting a bit creaky, had no difficultly scaling the fifteen foot wall to go investigating – the ivy was three layers deep against the walls, and the older stems at the back a full two inches thick!

Rejecting Other Half’s suggestion of hiring a flamethrower as environmentally unsound, I did the only thing possible in the circumstances – I closed the door, opened a can of Guinness, and cig in hand, put ‘plants for shade’ into Google UK …

Cru x

~*All images and text ©P.L.Sharp 2008*~
http://www.redscorpiondesign.co.uk