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elbows whenever I go past. It's a tough old brute. So I have no worries at all that it is being attacked by a battalion of major garden pests.It's been very mild this winter so it's no surprise that things are already active. The new leaf shoots

to be relatively common. And second they have to have some impact on humans: they have to be pretty or sinister, pest or helper, biter or worth eating. In other words, they have to get noticed. Tachina fera is large, but it has the secretive life style of searching

I'm always slightly perplexed when I hear someone talking about woodlice as if they were garden pests. My garden is full of the critters, but I've never even had need to raise my voice at them. They crowd around the flowerpots, under logs and stones

in the moist soil is a wireworm. I know these are supposed to be notorious garden and agricultural pests, but like so many insects, I can't really treat them as pests unless they reach pest proportions. A few of last year's potatoes had small holes in them

predators in the garden and they attack all manner of real pests including caterpillars, aphids and flies. They feed the chewed remains to their grubs back at the nest. The last five years have been really bad for wasps; either the hibernating queens have

. 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

nursery presented me with a dead specimen found flying around indoors last year.Unlike the berberis sawfly, which has caused quite a running commentary on this blog, Cimbex is never a garden pest, since it never reaches pest proportions. Instead

surprising. And since there are lots of them, and they’re very noisy, and messy, and untidy, it’s also hardly surprising that they’re not exactly welcomed. In fact, in Newhaven, they are regarded as a bit of a pest.Despite viral internet videos of gulls

, pinks and yellowy greens.The nondescript green or brown caterpillar feeds on a huge range of native and cultivated plants, but it's usually very secretive and never a pest. It was sitting in its distinctive pose: head down body slightly raised with its

to be a particular problem; this is a very distant rumour for me though, none has yet made its way this far into the capital.I’m not surprised that deer can be a right pest in the garden, elegant and beautiful though they are. For the last few decades