Weeding the Web

Why Spiderman's too sticky to love - and spiders could get bigger...

Super as it is to have the garden right outside the door as you work, there is a disadvantage. If you're in the same position, you'll probably recognise the problem. Bugs!

Caught! Back out to the garden with you!

A few months ago I was sent Insect Clean Spider Free. I haven't actually tried it yet as I don't have a huge problem with spiders. I do, though, have a problem with huge spiders. The arachnid in the picture above was just too big to live with and, if this sort of thing is going to become a habit, I might just reach for that repellent.

In fact, given the expectation of increased numbers of insects this year because of the warm winter, the spray might prove useful (it works on flies, mosquitoes and wasps too, it says). It contains lavandin oil, you spray it around doors and windows to discourage entry, and it promises to work for up to six months, repelling not killing.

Of course, the really cool insect remover would be a little green lizard a la Death in Paradise's Harry. Even if, in real life, it turns out to a silver ball and a blue bag. (Was I the only one who thought he was a trained reptile?)

 (If the video above doesn't appear, find it here.)

A Gekko is as big as it gets

And it turns out that Harry (real or not) is pretty much as big a bug-eater as he can be, taking account of his vertical peregrinations.  A new study, published this month,  examined climbing critters and came to the conclusion that, the larger the body size, the larger the sticky footpads required in relation to that body size. So a mite has sticky footpads equalling 0.02% of its body surface, and a gekko's footpads equal 4.3%. Gekkos are the world's largest adhesion-based climbers as they represent the limit of body surface to volume ratio that allows sticky pads to stay stuck to the wall before they're peeled off by the creature's weight.

Going by this calculation, Spiderman would need feet to fit European Size 145 shoes to scale a wall. Hmm, attractive.

And spiders can never, actually, get that big.

Launch of the giant spider?

That was the main thrust of the news reports. But there was more. What about species which have grown but not increased the size of their sticky pads and aren't found in a heap by the skirting board? (Think tree frogs.) They have found the secret to increased stickiness, while managing not to be rooted to the spot by their own adhesiveness. This is an area of huge interest, with scientists hoping to develop strong bio-adhesives on the back of it.

Which all means that Spiderman's hands and feet are probably just fine as they are, just very, very sticky. Far too sticky to be hugged.

What no one's actually spelt out, though, is that it surely means that that garden spider on the wall behind me could evolve to be much, much bigger...

 

A comma (butterfly) brings me to a full-stop

Never think that sci-fi writers are original. They just look at Nature and copy shamelessly. The Last of Us, a video game just launched, takes a quite revolting fungus attack on ants in the Amazon and transposes the idea to humans.

And surely it can't be long before someone weaves some fiction from last week's skin-crawling pictures of the cherry trees in Cambridge enwebbed by ermine moth caterpillars. (Perhaps they have; I'm far too squeamish to know much about sci-fi horror.)

So, when I saw this spiky, stripy caterpillar, resembling bird poo, I wondered with trepidation what had taken up residence.  The tufts must be there to put birds off but they do a good job on me too. I was torn between excitement at the possibility of a rare and dangerous creature taking a fancy to my gooseberry bushes, and the likelihood that, as it was actually on my gooseberry bush, it couldn't be rare at all.

And it isn't.

However, the ID was quite hard to track down, so, just in case you're wondering what a brown and black, stripy caterpillar, with tufts of white hair and a white splash on its back might be, I can now, thanks to the useful caterpillar guide from Moths Count, say categorically that it is the caterpillar of the Comma Butterfly, most commonly seen from May to August.

The comma has raised some excitement in recent years as it has returned to Scotland, having died out there in 1870s. Butterfly Conservation considers it rather fascinating, especially as its numbers declined sharply and are now increasing strongly. The caterpillar is indeed designed to look like a bird dropping, while the scalloped edges of the butterfly's wing (also brown and black) allow it to hibernate more safely among autumn leaves.

One of the few weeds I don't have in the garden is stinging nettles, and elms are obviously few and far between (was the demise of the elm a factor in its decline?), but it does also feed on species of Ribes. Hence the gooseberry.

It doesn't seem to be much of a pest, though. The bush has lost a few leaves, but this is nothing like an attack by the gooseberry sawfly and it has not been stripped naked.

 

Berlin, bare branches and the Botanical Garden Part 1

While gardeners in the UK were beginning to enjoy the new season, Husband and I managed to extend winter by almost a week. In Berlin. Not everyone's choice of holiday destination, but it does happen to have one of the world's largest botanical gardens.

Not that that's why we went. Hubs has been itching to visit, having overcome his anxiety, born of too many black and white movies, that he might be arrested and tortured into betraying his underground contacts.

It's easy to overdo the grim stuff. Berlin's recent history is not hidden. The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, the Topographie des Terrors (Germany under National Socialism), and the enormous Holocaust Memorial were quite enough for one day. When the Stasi Museum appeared on the Things To Do list, I pleaded depression and regained my equilibrium with a concentrated diet of superb paintings (Gemaldemuseum), fascinating architecture (Bundestag) and excellent sausages (everywhere).

Unfortunately spring is even later than it is here (it must always be a bit behind us), and with everything brown, tired or downright dead, it reminded me of the garden of Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant, where winter never left. There were even heaps of snow in dank, forgotten corners.

Gardening and greenery are just waiting to burst out, though. Our first inkling flashed past us on the way from the airport (no chance for photos). What looked like a very neat shanty town, with various dwellings and sharply delineated plots, was a Kleingarten, a considerably less shambolic version of our allotments. (Ben Knight gives a lovely flavour of Berlin Kleingartens, which comprise over 3% of the city's area, and Sarah Webb describes the serious business of getting a Kleingarten hedge right in Bremen.) And the birdsong that greeted us every day as we left our very centrally placed hotel on Friedrichstrasse was what first alerted me to the fact that there was more nature in the city than was apparent.

Here's some of what we found:

Display of gardening items in the Galeries Lafayette, a shopping centre so gorgeous that even I almost wanted to shop!

A Patrick Blanc "Mur Vegetal", setting off an unexpected sphinx in the Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus bookshop.

Might have had a coffee here, but it was closed for a private do. Gardening Jules was there at the same time and has some lovely photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Dwarfed by their surroundings, two beehives on top of the Berliner Dom (German Baroque - OK, but not worth the entrance fee, especially if you love Roman Baroque). Part of the Berlin is Buzzing campaign to create "a functioning urban nature and the conservation of ecosystems...and train young beekeepers".

Garden outside the Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin, April 2013

The garden outside the Bauhaus Archiv was sadly brown, tired and dusty. Bauhaus theory for Mies van der Rohe's one-storey court houses decreed that "floor area of the house and surface area of the plot had to form a harmonious relationship, with garden design and planting contributing to it. Garden plan and the interior arrangement of the house had to be interrelated, the views from the often large windows exactly calculated for near, middle and distance vision." This obviously wasn't meant to be a demonstration.

Bare branches weren't all bad. It was easy to see the enormous amount of mistletoe that grows around the city. Here it's outside the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Henry Moore's The Archer.

From fleece-wearing weather it turned in a week to 25 degrees, bringing a hint of green to city trees and the start of spring to the Botanical Garden. More in Part 2.

Bee nests from an expert at nurturing nature

What with all the news of neonicotinoids and declining bee numbers, the urge is certainly to try to make our gardens as bee-friendly as possible.

Environmental educator, author and researcher, George Pilkington has studied bee behaviour more than most and last November won a Green Apple Award for Environmental Best Practice in Wildlife and Conservation from The Green Organisation.

He was a founder member of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and runs the Nurturing Nature website, which just buzzes with information on subjects ranging from sustainable gardening to ecotherapy to composting. And, of course, bees.

His research into why commercially produced bumblebee nests often don't work resulted in his producing his own version, complete with a bumblebee "catflap" which is a deterrent to the predatory wax moth.

For solitary bees he's also produced a nestbox with viewing panels (I'm very tempted), which means you can watch red mason bees go about their business of tussling for territory and laying eggs.

Click on the links to see videos of the boxes in action.

Identifying Butterflies

NB This site has now disappeared from the web. It refers to ButterflyGarden.co.uk, which was a super resource. Sad to see it go.

You’d think it would be easy. But…

The difficulty of identifying butterflies became apparent when a friend and I “did” the local (and prolific) Lepidoptera of South Africa on holiday. Not only were our subjects never still, but we found that many looked very alike, especially those named Greater and Lesser. Our fervour for self-education lasted—ooh, half an hour.

But if you find yourself staring at one that isn’t white and sitting on a cabbage (no problem identifying those!) and wondering what it is, the charming Butterfly Garden can help.

Illustrated with beautiful photos taken by Linda Walls in her Gloucestershire garden, it contains information on each of the fifty-eight resident British butterfly species and on forty-five plants to attract butterflies.

She also gives a month-by-month breakdown of which butterflies are on the wing, tips on photography and help with identification.

It’s poignant viewing because Linda died in 2006 after fighting leukaemia. Her husband honoured her wish that the site remain available and it’s an attractive and helpful resource that stands as a lovely memorial to Linda.