Gardening’s king of trivia and brain-teasers, Graham Clarke
Facts you didn’t know about…garden pests!
Early summer is when garden plants are most at risk from pests. Plants are young, tender, lush and full of moisture, making them at their most appealing to pests – whether the two, four- or six-legged kinds! Let’s look at some pest curios:
■ Female aphids (greenfly and blackfly) are capable of virgin births – no males required. Also, she can carry developing young, which are themselves already carrying developing young! This increases population numbers rapidly: one estimate is that one aphid could generate 600 billion descendants – in one season (yikes)!
■ Male vine weevils do not exist. One adult weevil can lay many hundreds of eggs between April and September, so, by year five, could produce more than six million eggs!
■ Rabbits are formidable pests in rural gardens, but these cute-looking creatures are not actually native to Britain. We have to thank the 11th century Normans for introducing them. They brought them across on ships, and farmed them for their meat. The rabbits were allowed to run free and breed in fenced off areas, called warennes (if your name is Warren, Warrener, Warrender or something similar, your ancestors probably dealt in rabbit meat). The trade collapsed when the rabbits escaped, quickly bred and became easy to catch.
Wow! I didn’t know that…
■The fuchsia gall mite, which regularly ranks in the top 10 of most troublesome UK garden pests, was only first discovered in the UK in 2007. The microscopic mites cause the shoots and flowers of fuchsias to distort.
■ In Victorian times, gardeners would keep a toad in the greenhouse to deal with pests. Toads eat insects, grubs, slugs and even earwigs. They need dense, moist places under benches, but they must have access to ponds for breeding.
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