Leslie Cox
Special to The Record
You will not always know who your friends are in the garden. Mostly because you often do not even see them.
Case in point: The other day I was topping up my two fountains in the front garden. The water level in one dips because of the birds’ boisterous showers. The level in the other goes down because Sadie has claimed it as her personal outdoor water bowl.
Feeling lazy enough to dispense with hauling out the hose, I was using a juice jug to fulfil the job. Obviously, my reasoning was skewed because it cost me multiple trips to the kitchen sink for refills.
Honestly! You must be thinking the Duchess of Dirt has lost her marbles but I assure you I have not. For if I had not selected said juice jug, I would not have made the most amazing discovery that morning.
I had picked up a hitchhiker on my jug and it was the tiniest spider I have ever seen… outside of a hatch of spider babies, that is. Truthfully, it was a jumping spider species that was not much bigger than the very tip of my mechanical pencil. And it had its breakfast in its mouth! (Jumping spiders are amazing hunters.)
It was very hard to tell what it was eating, even zooming in with the macro lens on my camera, but I suspect breakfast was a nice juicy aphid nymph. Kudos to the spider for taking care of a pest for me.
This is just one instance where we have had help from the “creepy crawlies” in the garden.
Years ago, I actually witnessed a garter snake stalking a slug - catching it and devouring it. Ugh, right? Until you realize the snake has just saved some plants from unsightly slug damage. Now I welcome garter snakes in our garden, except the ones who insist on stalking our goldfish and young koi. Those I relocate to the compost bins.
Not squeamish enough yet? Let’s talk about earwigs.
My mom often voiced her displeasure about earwigs because it was her childhood chore to shake “the devils” out of the dahlias before bringing the cut flowers indoors. And yet, I recently disturbed a female and a whole bunch of young ones in one of our deciduous azaleas. Those earwigs were actually hunting the azalea sawfly larvae who were skeletonizing many of the leaves on the shrub right down to the mid-rib. In fact, there were a number of insect species scouring the azalea to eradicate those larvae for me. In my book, earwigs are my friends, but then we don’t have any dahlias in our garden.
There is one new insect pest in our garden this year: a green caterpillar that was caught hiding in a rolled leaf on my latest rhododendron acquisition… after it had chewed a sizable portion out of the leaf. Argh! This first interloper has been succinctly dealt with but I wonder which of the beneficial species will come to the rescue and feast on any family members who arrived with this newbie.
It was not the red crossbill flock that showed up in the garden to bathe in the stream to our pond. You know, I don’t ever remember seeing this bird species in our garden before. Looking them up in our bird book, there is no mention this bird visits B.C., although I did see mention of probable sightings in roughly our area on a BC birdwatch website. The white-winged crossbill is known to be in B.C. but our bird visitors did not have the two white wing streaks.
Regardless, I am glad these birds dropped in. They provided a delightful breath of entertainment while they were here.
Entertaining visitors this summer? You can still visit our garden through July and August but by appointment only. Please contact us through my website: duchessofdirt.ca
Leslie Cox co-owns Growing Concern Cottage Garden in Black Creek. Her website is at www.duchessofdirt.ca and her column appears every second Thursday in the Record throughout the spring and summer months.
