the mixed blessing of the asian lady beetle

With copper-colored wings and an emerald head, the Japanese beetle is pretty, but devastating.

I love Iris as much as Iris love sunshine so we are both happy with this May’s weather. The Thuja occidentalis conifer offers a cool photographic backdrop after coming through a frosty patch of weather in early spring

No other plant native to South Carolina has such fragrant and beautiful spring blooms and stunning fall color as the witch-alders. Fothergilla was named after Dr. John Fothergill, an English physician and gardener who funded the travels of John Bartram through the Carolinas in the 1700’s. These beautiful shrubs have been planted in both American and English gardens for over 200 years, including gardens of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, is a popular celebration in the United States, due to the number of Americans, 10.5%, with Irish heritage. One million Irish emigrated to North America, Australia, or other parts of Great Britain in the mid-1800s because of the potato disease now known as late blight. Late blight, caused by the water mold, Phytophthora infestans, destroyed the Irish potato crops in 1845 through 1849 and caused the Irish Potato Famine. Another one million people died from hunger or disease.

For years, Clemson Extension personnel in South Carolina have received claims from many homeowners that they have Japanese or Asian giant hornets on their property or nesting in their homes. They have not. They have either had native cicada killers, baldfaced hornets, or the exotic European hornet. All these wasps are large, but they are not as large or intimidating as the Asian giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia. South Carolinians often use the subspecies name Japanese hornet, Vespa mandarinia japonica, but experts have merged the two as just the Asian giant hornet. Unfortunately, now some in the news media are reporting them as “murder hornets.”

A lot of attention recently has been on periodical cicadas, which are coming out of the ground after 17 years across parts of the Southeast and much of the Mid-Atlantic region. However, another insect is about to come out of the ground in South Carolina too, and this one is not just a novelty – it can completely defoliate many plants in your yard. That’s right, folks, it’s almost Japanese beetle season!

The eastern Hercules beetle is one of the largest and heaviest insects in the U.S. In South Carolina, there is only one Hercules beetle species, Dynastes tityus. These insects are a type of beetle in the family Scarabaeidae – the same family as June beetles, Japanese beetles, and dung beetles.

WHEN I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT SOMETHING, it’s hard to shut me up. I love plants, and frogs, so I blog about gardening; I love being a sister (well, most days I do), so I blog about that, too.

Since the book “Planting in a Post-Wild World” came out in 2015, co-authored by Claudia West with Thomas Rainer, I’ve been gradually studying their ideas and starting to have some light bulbs go off, on how to be inspired to put plants together in the ways that nature does, in layered communities.Claudia joined me on the July 17, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast to about some of the practical, tactical aspects of plant community-inspired designs that we can app

Quick backstory: You may remember Charley, co-author of my most-used field guide “Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” from our recent interview about galls and leaf mines, two of his specialties.(I’m giving away two more copies; enter by commenting in the form way down at the bottom of this page, after reading the entry details in the tinted box just before that. The book can help you to know what you are seeing when you look closer, too—kind of like always having Charley by your side.)When that story ran, Charley had noticed a photo I used to accompany it–of a squiggly “leaf mine” I’d observed in my Asian-native big-leaved perennial called Petasites. He’d wondered if it was caused by the insect that feeds in a few different genera in the tribe Senecioneae (including some native American botanical cousins of Petasites).  Why don’t you come try to find out, I’d suggested—and while you’re here, why don’t we have a

A NOTHER SELECTION FROM MY EARLIEST PROSE, circa 1961, unearthed in a bout of housecleaning here this winter. This one earned me a star (which seems just right for a penmanship exercise about space travel), and marked the day the first American, Alan Shepard (who in 1971 would walk on the moon) went up in space.

YES, YES, I KNOW: I have already told you I love hellebores. While waiting for mine to reach full bloom, I took an online tour this very cold morning of other hellebore plantings that are enviably farther along.