Tag: pest

August 14th – Another tree I keep an eye on is the odd pear tree growing near the top of the bank between the canal and new pond at Clayhanger. I have no idea how it came to b there and suspect it sprouted from a discarded fruit core.

This small but dense tree usually fruits copiously, but this year is suffering terribly from blight and bird attack. The fruit on this tree have never looked appetising at all, to be honest.

An interesting thing though, and I’ll keep watching as it grows and develops over the years and hope that one day the harvest prospers. 

July 30th – I see the horse chestnut leaf miners are back with a vengeance now. A moth lays eggs, whose larvae burrow through the large leaves, eating them and leaving huge brown scars, which suddenly appear around this time of year. A relatively new problem, it doesn’t seem to hurt the trees, but it causes premature leaf fall, and they look bad. 

Experts are assessing links between this and the canker also affecting many of these stately, arboreal giants.

It’s a great shame, I love these trees and hope this ugly affliction soon passes. I cycled a loop around Shenstone and Stonnall and I don’t think there’s an unaffected tree anywhere in the area.

August 18th – The poor acorns are really hampered this year – the gall wasps really seem to have affected them. These seem very like knopper galls, which are caused by the wasp injecting a chemical encased egg into the acorn bud when it’s forming. The chemical causes the acorn to mutate, and inside, the wasp larvae hates and feeds.

There are now a good few healthy acorns, though, so perhaps it’s not as bad as I feared, but I do wonder why it just seems to be oaks that are tortured so.

August 7th – This oak tree was spotted by the cycle way in Pelsall, and seems to be afflicted by the same ills befalling similar trees everywhere I go. The poor oaks this year seem to have few acorns, leaves dying off early and tiny, deformed acorns.
I hope this is an aberrant year and in seasons to come are better.

June 19th – Passing through Lichfield today on my way home, I stopped by Festival Gardens to check out the conker trees. They seem to be in fairly good nick, and aren’t showing much leaf miner activity at the moment. They are, however, showing a huge amount of fruit.

I think it’s going to be another great year for conkers. The spiny cased nuts look almost prehistoric to me at this stage.

August 7th – I noted today with some sadness that the horse chestnut trees in St. Johns Hill in Shenstone, and the ones forming the avenue and hedges along Hollyhill Lane towards Footherley were badly affected this year by the leaf miner moth. The tree survives this new pest, but starts to look sick around late summer, and drops it’s leaves early. It’s thought to affect the conker yeild, although there’s no conclusive proof of this yet. First observed in Wimbledon, London, in 2002, this pest has spread like wildfire, and as yet, there’s no sign of a solution. Very sad.