Reshaping

Anyone who has been reading my blog for a while will know about our battle with the mighty box tree caterpillars 🐛. Little chaps who munch their way through our beautiful topiaried box bushes every year. Well, they’ve arrived. I think a little earlier this year, and they’ve already started on their feeding frenzy. We decided last year that we were no longer going to battle with them, and what we needed to do is look for an alternative solution.

The challenge is that our garden is very much structured around some beautiful box tree shapes. So what happens when they’ve all been eaten by the caterpillar?

We have already removed five bushes, up by the pool. Two of them we replaced with a couple of small fir trees, which seem to be settling in well, and a third one we replaced with a small olive tree, again it looks like it’s doing well.

We also bought two more olive trees to plant by the pool – these are much bigger than the one we bought last year.

For the walled garden we’ve made a different choice, we’ve bought some Ilex which we are going to start off in pots and begin to shape them.

With the box bushes, we will cut away any eaten foliage and try and keep them as much as possible as they are. When the Ilex are bigger, and the box starts losing the battle, we will replace them, but let’s see first how much damage those little caterpillars do when left to their own devices.