The box ball blues

As if his beleaguered box hadn't already taken a beating, Toby now has to deal with some hungry box caterpillars

- TOBY BUCKLAND

AT first, I thought my box topiary had sunburn. Then I remembered the washout weather and wondered if they had drowned. But meteorological matters aren’t the cause of their malaise. My box is under attack from a relatively new menace that’s probably already in (or on its way to) your garden.

The box tree caterpillar is a species that hails from China, but in 2008 a clutch took a long-haul flight to Germany and after visiting Switzerland and the Netherlands, a few fluttered to gardens in Sussex and Surrey. By the time they were noticed, they’d expanded their numbers and travel plans, and were visiting gardens across the south, plus a growing list of postcodes in the north.

I’d seen their damage in other people’s hedges and blithely assumed that my garden would be off their radar. How wrong I was. Close inspection of my topiary balls reveals the tell-tale signs of their presence: missing and glued-together leaves, frass, webbing and a mob of feeding caterpillars.