Mother Nature is doing her own thing

The trouble with nature is that it has a mind of its own – it is very difficult to get it to do what you want it to!

For example, when I built the summerhouse base, I constructed a magnificent underground hedgehog house, plus lots of space underneath the raised decking. I thought the hedgehogs would be fighting to be first to take up residence, but there’s not been so much as a sniff.

I’ve also constructed lots of insect-friendly areas (woodpiles, holes drilled in old tree trunks, logs left around to rot) and planted flowers which are good for bees and butterflies.

I’m sure my efforts haven’t been entirely in vain, but Mother Nature does pretty much seem to have bypassed my worthy attempts to manage her activities and done her own thing.

I was checking out my flower border at the beginning of the month and was surprised to see a big clump of Solomon’s Seal has been reduced to stalks. Any remaining leaves were swarming with grey/green caterpillars with little black heads. When I looked at the other clumps, they were nearly all the same. Some had already been eaten pretty much completely.

I wondered what magnificent butterfly would rise from the devastation, but I couldn’t identify these caterpillars in any of my books. As ever, Google found the answer – not a butterfly, not a moth, they were the larvae of the Solomon’s Seal Sawfly. I’d never heard of a sawfly, but they are related to bees and wasps and at least they have the good manners not to eat my Solomon’s Seal until after they have flowered. I think the plants will be robust enough to withstand this setback and the insect population of my garden has been increased, which is good for birds and other predators.

Sawfly larvae happily munching through my Solomon's Seal