Leaves Were Never Meant To Be "Perfect"

Monarch caterpillars and aphids on swamp pink milkweed (Asclepias incarnata)

Carolina silverbell - leafcutter bee "damage"

Pawpaw - Asimina triloba
Somewhere, sometime in our lives we were all taught that our landscape plants should have "perfect" foliage - that having leaves chewed up or infested with "bugs" was something that needed to be immediately addressed. That address was invariably some pesticide that targeted everything living.
As gardeners intent on creating a living landscape, we first have to rid ourselves of this faulty logic and then embrace the fact that our plants are truly alive. We celebrate the leaves that are being chewed upon as an indication that things are right. It is what leaves were made to do. Over millennia, plants have evolved to cope with herbivores in a great many ways. One of them is simply to grow new leaves... We trade "perfection" in our foliage for the life it provides for. When I first noticed the half-moon cuts on the new foliage of my sapling Carolina silverbell (Halesia carolina) I knew that my landscape was making the kind of progress that I hoped for. I was hard pressed when I first moved here to even lure a honeybee to my yard. I started hand-pollinating my key lime in hopes that I might get at least 1-2 limes in the late summer. I have rarely seen the leafcutter bees at work, either cutting leaves or pollinating my wildflowers, but this evidence on my silverbell shows me that they are here.
We do not plant for ourselves, we plant for the life around us. Though we get great pleasure from the beauty of our plantings, I trust that most of us get greater pleasure finding that they are supporting lives beyond our own. I was asked by a friend the other day whether I planted the pawpaw pictured above for the fruit or the butterflies because she had never had success getting fruit to set on it at our latitude. It was an easy question to answer. Although I would welcome a fruit or two from this tree over time, I had absolutely no intention of planting it for that purpose. It serves solely as a host plant for one of my favorite butterflies - the zebra swallowtail. It's a long shot hoping to attract this butterfly to a suburban setting like I live in, but it is worth a try - worth the space this plant will tie up in my overall landscape. Someday, I hope to walk out in my landscape and find that its leaves are being vigorously fed upon.
I have added 5 species of native milkweeds (Asclepias spp.) to my landscape and have a non-native one in a pot. They are beautiful plants, but they are here because they provide for monarch and queen butterflies. They also attract aphids. Milkweeds ALWAYS attract milkweed aphids in the same way that the song of the ice cream truck attracts children.  To many, the appearance of aphids causes a great deal of hand wringing.  I read comments all the time in social media posts asking for advice. There is only one right answer..... leave them alone. Don't misjudge me, I hate aphids, but in the 30+ years of leaving them alone, I've never had a plant die from them. What I do get are aphid predators - ladybug beetles, lacewings, and syrphid flies. They always arrive once the aphids are established and they always eat the aphids until they are gone. In a way, my butterfly host plants serve a dual function as the critical host for three amazing predatory insects. I also have to admit that I get great pleasure out of watching the aphids get devoured. It rewards my patience...
If our plants are not always under attack from something, there is probably something wrong. Underlying the notion of a living landscape is the belief that we need to allow our landscapes to become a part of nature and not view them as something outside of it. That does not mean that we fail to manage what we have created, but our management must be in concert with natural processes to the extent possible. We need to constantly weed out the unwanteds and we need to use sound management, without pesticides, on the problems that won't take care of themselves naturally. It's just that those situations are quite rare in a landscape designed with appropriate native plants and allowed to develop with nature.

The tomato hornworm is actually the caterpillar of an amazingly beautiful sphinx moth


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