It is the first day of June and some of our roses are already finished blooming. Pat Austen still has a few flowers but she does not look as lush as just a few weeks ago on the photo below.
The pure white Madame Hardy and the lavender colored Paradise put on their prettiest flowers in mid May.
Right now, the roses with clusters of small flowers are prettiest: below are Ballerina and Lavender Dream.
Here are some more pictures of our favorite roses: Zephyrine Drouhin and Eglantyne.
The flowers are really pretty, but look carefully at the leaves. This year, almost all of our roses had some leaves that looked partially papery white. This was the work of so-called rose slugs, the larvae of a sawfly. These animals are neither flies nor slugs but plant-eating wasps, relatives of bees, hornets and yellow jackets with an appetite for green leaves. This year we had a lot of them!
The larvae of some species eat only the soft green underside of the leaf and leave the harder tissue behind. The adult sawflies are very small animals. To show one, I borrowed a photo from an article by Michael Raupp.
Today, it looked like these “slugs” were done nibbling. However just as our roses grow back new leaves, the next round of attack is in progress. The larvae of another sawfly species eat the whole leaves while those are young and tender.
Meanwhile, our resident sparrows have babies to feed. Hopefully, many, many sawfly larvae will end up inside those hungry beaks!
Roses are not the only plants under attack right now, and sawflies are not the only hungry insects. The cool wet spring was perfect for aphids, which seem to multiply by the minute. But here, too, predators are getting ready. The red blob on the sage leaf below is the pupa of a lady bug. The next generation of these beetles have a feast waiting for them.
This is the only way pests are controlled in our garden. We don’t use sprays or other poisons. Since our livelihood does not depend on it, we can afford to let Nature take care of things.
Finally an update on our wild bees: This evening, we saw the first male longhorn bee of the season. He was right where we expected to find him: sleeping in the first open blossom of a Heliopsis sunflower.
