Garden Infestation - who is responsible?

z1a

I'd say the caterpillars are responsible.

konark

z1a wrote: »

I'd say the caterpillars are responsible.

I blame the parents.


Moths or butterflies or something.

Sapphire

The Chinese moth caterpillars have devastated box hedges in Britain (some hundreds of years old) and in continental European countries. Once they attack a box plant, they cannot be stopped. Sprays are terrible for the other creatures that live in gardens, and would have to be used very often to kill the caterpillars. There is nothing for it but to remove all the box hedges – which I am going to have to do, unfortunately, with my box hedging. As far as I know, the moths do not attack other plants.

Brock_and_Roll

In the long run, nature will prevail. A few box plants with slightly higher resistance will just about stay on their mortal coil and over time resistant species will emerge and breeders will hasten this process.

Saw this in the 70s with Dutch Elm disease - elms are still with us, and more recently with oak sudden death fungii.

Zanderman

Brock_and_Roll wrote: »

In the long run, nature will prevail. A few box plants with slightly higher resistance will just about stay on their mortal coil and over time resistant species will emerge and breeders will hasten this process.

Saw this in the 70s with Dutch Elm disease - elms are still with us, and more recently with oak sudden death fungii.

In the very long run, yes, or rather maybe.

Nature doesn't restore a previous status quo though, it just adjusts to the new reality.

Your elm example illustrates this nicely - elms are still with us, but only as very occasional trees and, more often, as shrubs. That's not a restoration of the situation though.

Up until the 70s mature (and very stately) large mature elms were a dominant landscape feature, a distinctively-shaped tree that you saw everywhere. Had been like that for centuries. Not now though. Now they merely survive, they don't thrive, and their distinctive landscape presence has gone, probably for good.

The surviving shrubby ones, if they start to grow to trees, suffer the same fate as the trees in the 70s.

So yes, nature adjusts, but it doesn't restore. Box, once the problem has spread everywhere, may never again be a regular garden feature, it may survive, but it might may never be able to recover fully. It might... but I'd bet it won't.