It rained on Sunday, so what better way to spend it than planting roses?
It rained on Sunday, so what better way to spend the day than planting roses? Well, I went and played Power Rangers in the bushes in Dulwich Park with 3-year-old, while my partner did the planting. She'd ordered them at Chelsea, and we'd almost completely forgotten about them when they arrived last week. Roses do very well in London, and so too do the insects that feed on them.
Apart from the leafcutter bees, which cut out those beautiful semicircles, the insects I most associate with roses are the rose leafhopper and the soft scale. I'm not being deliberately provocative when I say that I think they are beautiful and fascinating.
The rose leafhopper, Edwardsiana rosae, is a lovely pale hopper, elegant in form and delicate in line. I'm always amazed to see that skip turn into a flight which then turns and loops back on itself before the insect vanishes, returning onto the bush, but hidden on a leaf underside somewhere. These are nymphs, and therefore wingless and easier to photograph.
The soft scale, Parthenolecanium corni, is a beast of curious form indeed. It hardly looks like a living creature at all, and more like a small wart on the plant stem. I noticed them for the first time when photographing ants running up and down the branches. At each scale an ant would stop, tickle it with its antennae, and suck up the small droplet of honeydew that was presented.
Neither of these insects has ever reached pest proportions in my garden, so I've never had need to regard them as pests. On the other hand, the caterpillars of the rose sawfly, Arge pagana, shredded whole branches a few years ago so I waged war with a pair of narrow tweezers, squishing each one I came across.
