Resident weevil
It’s never much fun when you’re hit with a dose of vine weevil.
For a start, it’s embarrassing. It’s not the kind of thing you want to lean over the fence and tell other gardeners in a hurry. The important first question to ask is: who did I catch it from? And then the tricky next question: should I tell them that they gave me vine weevil.
The last time I caught vine weevil was years ago and I had no idea which garden centre I had got the perishing infestation from. This time round I knew.
For legal reasons I can’t name names, but I only bought one potted plant in the second half of 2018. It was a beautiful heuchera in an astonishing shade of flaming burgundy that caught my eye. Heuchera varieties have come on leaps and bounds over the last ten years. There was a time when you could only get heuchera ‘palace purple’. This was like the Mateus rosé of heucheras (bland and everybody tried it once).
Since that time in the 1990s every shade and every variegation has become available from ‘coral bells’ to ‘berry smoothie’, which is not a dignified name for a plant at all. Plants should have a bit of mystery to them, like a botanist’s surname with ii added awkwardly at the end, not sound like they come from the chilled drinks cabinet in Greggs.
Anyway, I took this little beauty home and placed it next to some other heucheras I had bought as plug plants from Thompson and Morgan which were slowly developing. The plan was to plant them all together some time in September. Despite attentive watering, about a month later I noticed that my singular acquisition was looking decidedly wilty. I picked the pot up for closer inspection and noticed that the top of the plant had been neatly excised from the roots.
“Vine weevil…”
I scurried to the bench and emptied out the pot, and sure enough, burrowing around were the characteristic little vine weevil maggots. And they had to die straight away. I wasn’t going to hang around for 50 million nematodes to do the job for me. It’s not much fun killing things, but I’ve been hardened to it by my time as a beekeeper. If you have a hive with ill-tempered, swarmy, aggressive bees the surest way of changing the hive temperament is by requeening. You can order queens in the post and they come in a little cage with an attendant retinue of workers, as queens can’t be expected to feed themselves.
However before you introduce her to her new subjects you have to find the grumpy old queen and dispose of her. Now this is a phenomenal insect to just bump off like a sundry character in Game of Thrones; she has been at the heart of what could be a 50,000-strong colony for anything up to three years. You can’t send her into exile and you’re very sorry, but look, this just isn’t working out…
After disposing of my weevil grubs, I plunged the remaining stump of leaves back into some compost and put it in a propagator. Then the nasty thought occurred – what about the other heucheras…?
I tentatively went back to the crime scene and gently tugged at the first, most exquisite of the plants I had nurtured since a plug. The leaves came away in my hands. In fact of the seven remaining, another three had contracted vine weevil and were nothing more than a plant top sitting divorced from the rest of the pot. Each in turn was disinterred, and the maggots dispatched, though it was noticeable that they weren’t as well-developed as the grubs from the garden centre purchase.
The garden centre in question has an excellent customer service record and would probably have taken back my heuchera ‘blushing fiery crimson damsel inferno’ or whatever it was called under their failing plants policy, but I didn’t want to risk it. Explaining that you caught vine weevil from them might spark a defensive reaction and there's a slim chance I didn't. Except the vine weevil was only in the heuchera pots, and it couldn't have come from the plug plants, and it was most developed in the one plant I bought. You don't need a moustache and a Belgian accent to fathom that one out.
Next time I buy something on impulse I’m going to check the pot the second I get home.
