I wandered over.
This “ladybug” was four times the size of a ladybug, and it was eating the rose.
“That’s no lady.”
“What is it?”
I went up to the house to check my reference book. By the time I returned with the answer, Katie had found another dozen of them.
Japanese beetles. Remarkably, I had never even seen a Japanese beetle in my life. They are rather pretty (in the abstract), sporting a metallic copper shell that gleams in the sunshine, and I could see why Katie was attracted to them. I was going to have to deliver some bad news.
“We have to kill them,” I told Katie. “Or we’re not going to have any roses left.”
Her face fell.
“Want to help?” I plucked one off the rose and crunched it between thumb and forefinger.
“Gross!” Katie exhaled and headed for the house.
Well, that was tactful. Couldn’t I have just dropped it into a jar? Now I had lost my helper. And helpers—paid or otherwise—were in short supply. As gardens were spreading like purslane around the property, maintaining those gardens was becoming more and more of a challenge. In addition to the two-thousand-square-foot kitchen garden, there was a cottage garden Anne had created in front of the house; a hillside of lilies and lavender planted for erosion control; a spring bulb garden; separate beds outside the kitchen garden for mint and horseradish, two invasives that spread underground; and of course the rose garden. Any one of these secondary gardens was itself larger in size than all of our Yonkers landscaping combined. Anne helped when she could but had her hands full with the echinacea, black-eyed Susans, mullein, and fox-glove in the cottage garden. We did, however, have two able-bodied kids whose contributions to the garden thus far were limited to consumption. One summer evening while we ate dinner on the porch, Anne tried to get me some help.
We were eating fresh corn off the grill, and the reviews from the kids were as shining as the corn itself, glistening under melted butter.
“Dad could really use some help with the garden,” Anne ventured, sensing an opportunity.
“Not it,” Zach quickly said.
“What about that actor?” Katie asked, apparently having overheard us discussing Christopher Walken.
“He went back to Hollywood,” I said, not wanting to go into it with the kids.
“Did I miss something?” Zach asked, puzzled.
Anne pressed on. “You know where all this great food you love comes from, right?”
I think they did and they didn’t. They knew, of course, that the food was coming from our garden, but they didn’t really connect the time and toil that went into it with the food that was showing up on the table. It just kind of showed up, or at best, one of them was sent out to pluck a few sprigs of basil. While I wanted their help, I had to acknowledge that the kids had other chores, and the garden really was my hobby. Besides, I wanted any help to be voluntary, or at least given willingly. There is nothing worse than a cranky, unhappy kid in the garden—especially when it’s someone other than me—so we didn’t press the issue. They did both offer to help me out with nongardening tasks (thus giving me more time to garden), and I gratefully accepted (or fell on) that two-edged sword.
Back in the rose garden, I watched Katie climb the hill to the house, sighed, and picked the beetles off by hand. As with the tent caterpillars that had almost devastated the apple trees, by the following day, dozens of new beetles had arrived, and it was clear that I was in another death match.
Because we do bring roses into the house, and because we so treasure their perfume, I was reluctant to use a smelly insecticide on the bugs. So, following my usual progression of pest control, I picked and pinched for a few more days, but I was losing the battle—and the roses. I then moved on to an “organic” pesticide (pyrethrins, which kill on contact, but only if you “catch them in the act”), then to a stronger organic substance, rotenone, and finally, when that proved ineffective, to a manufactured chemical pesticide (containing carbaryl and malathion), which, if I had started with it in the first place, would have saved many roses and much aggravation.
Notice the progression of degree of contact with the insect as the battle escalates. First you start out with physical contact (pinching); then you move on to direct contact with a spray; finally you dispense with contact altogether and slather the bush in a chemical with a residual effect that kills the invader while you are in bed or at work. As with my apple-farming experience, I again found that, while I coveted the organic ideal, one of the problems with organic pest control is the degree of contact it requires with the invaders. Most of us hobbyist gardeners aren’t around our plants enough hours of the day to become that intimate with the pests.
Eventually I did eliminate most of the beetles, and I only had to contend with the black spot fungus that English roses seem particularly susceptible to. But unbeknownst to me at the time, the battle had only just begun. The following year, all grass within fifty feet of the roses started turning brown in early summer.
Sod webworms again? I wasn’t sure. These brown spots looked different, not like sod webworms at all, more like drought. I gave the lawn extra water, but the browned-out area continued to spread until it had taken over most of the lawn. As is my wont, I studied, analyzed, and pondered while the brown patches spread, until I finally remembered the advice I had received last time, to dig around where the diseased turf meets the healthy and look for insects. I put a spade into the brown turf, but it wasn’t necessary; the turf could easily be peeled away from the roots like a zipper. I was shocked. No wonder the grass was brown—it wasn’t attached to the roots! I scampered around the lawn on my knees, grabbing handfuls of turf that came out effortlessly. A little digging revealed a few small white grubs. Oh, great, I thought. Yet another new pest. I looked them up in the book and was dumb-founded to learn that they weren’t a new pest at all, just a new form of an old pest. Grubs are the larvae form of Japanese beetles. Son of a bitch! I’d had no idea the two were related!
I had killed the beetles, but not before they had laid, I don’t know, maybe millions of eggs in my lawn, and the larvae from these hatched eggs were now getting even, like the progeny of some science fiction alien. And soon they would metamorphose into new Japanese beetles, who would feed on my roses right above them, and they would lay millions of eggs in the lawn, which would hatch into grubs, and …
My head was spinning. What had I started here? I looked into an organic solution and learned about milky spore, an organism that you sprinkle from a can onto your lawn. It is harmless to most soil life but attacks grubs. The only problem was, it takes a year or two to become effective, and even then it is not always successful. Two years? I wasn’t going to have a blade of grass left in two weeks if I didn’t do something soon. Beetle traps were an option, too, but they have to be placed well upwind of the roses—that would be in Larry’s yard—and it was way too late for that, anyway. I slathered the lawn in diazinon and repeated the treatment two weeks later, but the lawn was by now pockmarked with patches of bare dirt and toupees of loose brown grass. The sod, what was left of it, would never regain its former glory. And despite the chemical treatments, the following year would bring more Japanese beetles, and more grubs. Because of these mere four rosebushes, I now have to treat the lawn for grubs regularly. Fragile ecosystems indeed!
The common view (including, generally, mine) of chemical pesticides is that chemicals upset the natural balance of nature, while organic processes maintain the balance. Now, maybe I’m just trying to rationalize dosing my lawn in diazinon, but it does seem that in the case of my roses and beetles, the situation seemed to be quite the opposite. The natural balance was upset organically (by the introduction of roses), and it was the application of a pesticide that restored the prior condition. This is not to say that I advocate the wholesale application of pesticides. I am old enough to remember Silent Spring, and I remain a committed environmentalist, using pesticides reluctantly, guil
tily, and only as a last resort. I’m sure that watering the lawn with diazinon did not come without a cost: in addition to the grubs, I probably killed every earthworm and beneficial bug in the top six inches of the soil. (In fact, diazinon, a derivative of nerve gas research from the world wars, has since been taken off the market because of concerns about its effect not only on fish and wildlife but on the workers who manufacture and apply it.) But the end result, at least, was that the pesticide restored my lawn to the grub-free condition it had been in before the introduction of the roses. An environmentalist would argue, correctly, that a lawn is not a “natural condition” to begin with. But I would add that neither are vegetable and rose gardens.
THE OLD BARN on the property is connected to the kitchen garden and the house via a wide, grassy lane, bordered by low stone walls, that we refer to as “the driveway,” even though the last vehicles to drive down it were the two wrecked cars that we found in the barn when we bought the house. A month or two before the corn started toppling over like tenpins, sections of this driveway began to turn brown in parallel strips and odd rectangular patterns. I dug around, under, and near the brown spots but didn’t find any bugs, so I turned to our landscaper for a diagnosis. Carmine—this was before he fired us—was thrilled at the opportunity, having just completed a course in the treatment of lawn diseases and being eager to put his new training to work. He pulled up a couple of blades of grass and held them up to the sky, turning and examining them while alternately pursing his lips and squinting. Then he consulted the reference book he kept in the truck and came up with a diagnosis: some fungus, I forget the name. Cure? Maybe none, but a pricey fungicide application might work. Oh, well, at least it wasn’t insects this time. I did a little research of my own and found that, for this particular fungus, the most effective treatment was to keep the grass well watered and healthy. As we were in the midst of yet another drought, this was not easy. I tried, but the more I watered, the worse it got, and it seemed to be progressing up the driveway from the barn to the garden. Nevertheless I kept watering, like a good soldier, hoping for a turnaround that never came. By midsummer the grass driveway was shot through with brown stripes and rectangles, my Hudson Valley version of English crop circles.
And now the corn was toppling over, stalk by stalk. Plus another apple-thieving squirrel was in the orchard. Not to mention that after several blissful, bug-free years, Colorado potato beetles had finally discovered I was growing potatoes and had moved in for the kill. What next? Indeed what was left? Crop circles, toppling corn—things seemed to be spinning out of control.
I was useless at work, distracted and short tempered. What was I doing here? I should be at home, protecting my crops. Over the years, my colleagues had suffered my complaints about groundhogs and deer, endured my obsessions with Japanese beetles, and witnessed my stealing apple blossoms from hospital grounds. Now, trying to get my attention while I only wanted to talk about my corn, they must have wondered if I was going over the edge. Admittedly I was only going through the motions of working when a programmer came into my office for help with some computer code.
“The program just started blowing up all of a sudden,” he said. “It was working yesterday.”
“You haven’t made any changes?”
“Nothing,” he insisted. “Can you take a look?”
I had other things on my mind. Maybe if I just gave him some guidance, I thought, he’d leave my office so I could go back to pondering my garden problems.
“I’m a little tied up right now,” I said. Which, in a sense, was true. “But consider this: the problem may be appearing here, but I suspect it was caused by a change you made somewhere else. You’re too focused on this piece of code. Go back through all the modules you’ve changed in the past week. Somewhere you’ve introduced a bu—”
The word “bug” was hardly out of my mouth when I realized what I was saying. I needed to get another look at my garden. I checked my watch. Two o’clock. Close enough. I headed home.
Standing above the garden, I looked at the progression of brown stripes from the barn, up the driveway, to the garden gate, to … the corn. Of course. If the two problems were related, it could only be one thing. I grabbed a trowel and started digging in the corn bed, not under the fallen corn as I had a few days earlier, but under the adjacent, healthy corn. And there I found them—bugs. Sod web-worms, merrily munching away on the corn roots. That was no fungus in the driveway; it was sod webworms. They had started at the pool, eaten their way up to the barn, then up the driveway into the garden, right up the grass paths in the garden, which Bridget had insisted on but I had never wanted and had let myself be talked into. Those … those… those…I was apoplectic. Only one word would suffice … those fucking grass paths! Again! Arrrggh! I was beside myself. Panicked and giving hardly a second thought to the environmental or dietary implications of it, I immediately soaked the entire corn bed in enough diazinon to clear out every living thing in that bed. It was either stop the filthy critters now, or treat the entire garden—up to this point, a totally organic garden—later.
So there it was. I had done it. Somehow spraying apple trees had become acceptable—distasteful, but acceptable—and as I’ve said, I’d reconciled myself to the application of pesticides to restore the balance of the lawn, but soaking a vegetable-garden bed in diazinon represented for me a sad defeat, prompted as much by anger as by wisdom.
The evening that followed was oppressive, sticky and suffocating. The house fan droned through the night but was only replacing the hot, humid air in the house with the hot, humid air outside. I gave up trying to sleep around midnight and went downstairs, where it was a little cooler, then outside to look at the sky. I ended up in the garden, lying on my back as the gathering clouds obscured the stars, thinking about the garden, the universe, and the lessons I had just learned about both human nature and Mother Nature.
On the human side, neither the landscaper nor I had looked at the situation objectively. I was so primed from prior experience to look to an animal as the culprit, I had unconsciously closed my mind to other possibilities, no matter how obvious. The pattern of destruction, “like the march of an invading army,” should have been a tip-off to look for an army. And the only place it could be was underground. As for Carmine, he had just attended a class on fungi, so he saw a fungus. If he had just taken a class on sunspots, I suppose he would have seen sunspot damage.
But as revealing about human nature as this episode was, the main lessons here are to be learned—as usual—from Mother Nature. I am always amazed (and a bit awed) at the chain of events in my miniature ecological landscape and the unexpected relationships between seemingly unconnected events. Plant a rose, lose a lawn. Buy a lawn, lose the corn. I had never seen either grubs or sod web-worms, and now, because in one case I reached for ultimate beauty, and in the other, tried to buy an instant lawn, I may have to battle both for life. And this is but an infinitesimal example of the complicated webs that connect all living things. All I did was plant four rosebushes. What happens when we dam a river? Replace a hundred-acre field with a shopping mall? Do we even know enough about the complex environmental relationships to be able to do a so-called environmental-impact study? It’s almost all too enormous and dizzying to even contemplate. As the sky clouded up, I thought about my corn, a staple of the Anasazi diet, and how easily I could have lost every last ear. I considered the disappearance of the Anasazi from the Jemez Mountains. Maybe it wasn’t drought. Maybe they had planted something new—maybe even a flower—that attracted bugs that killed the corn that fed the Indians. It’s a complicated business.
And I thought about the last time I lay in this very spot, before it was a garden, when Anne and I gazed at a starry sky, and how innocent and hopeful I was then. I yearned for a return to that innocence, to the perfect garden that existed in books and catalogs and our dreams. A drop of rain fell, making me laugh. Is that the best you can do? Come on, bring it on, big guy. How about some thunder a
nd lightning, just to make sure I got the message? But I was denied even my dramatic denouement. It only drizzled, a few of nature’s teardrops landing on my face.
Statuary Rape
I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.
—Cato the Elder
Anne wanted an obelisk. For the center of the garden. Not just any old obelisk, but a six-foot, pink granite “Cleopatra wuz here” monument the local garden center had been trying to get rid of for two years. Think the Washington Monument with a small ball atop it. Without the windows. And pink.
Another test for our marriage.
It has been said that married couples should not be bridge or doubles-tennis partners. Some would add gardening partners to the list, and come to think about it, how often do you actually see a husband and wife in the garden together, working side by side? It can be like trying to grow mint and horseradish in the same bed. In our case, the garden ultimately brings us together more than it separates us, but sometimes it does become an alfresco boxing ring, complete with corner posts and (electric) ropes.
We went a few rounds one Saturday morning after I had missed a couple of weekends of hoeing. The cucumber bed was choked with purslane, the corn bed was a disaster, and the tomato plants were competing with chicory for their very survival. Looking out the kitchen window, I sighed. “Jeez, the garden’s getting out of hand.”
“Don’t worry, I’m spending the entire morning in the garden,” Anne assured me, having heard, I assumed, my cry for help. Relieved, I went out and did some errands, and when I returned in the afternoon, the cucumber bed was still choked with purslane, the corn bed was a disaster, and the tomato plants were competing with chicory for their very survival. Anne was dozing by the pool.
“I thought you were going to work in the garden today,” I said, inadvertently waking her.
The $64 Tomato Page 16