In my garden:  Cutworm curled up on Foxglove leaf.

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See those chew holes all over this Digitalis plant (above)?  Yep.  Sign.  Big Sign!  Virtually unmistakeable sign in my garden.  And not the “Where’s a CSI when you need one?” sort of sign either.  It is the blatantly smoking gun, the carelessly left fingerprint, the telltale pool of seeping Foxglove lifeblood.

For the record, I’m an avid fan of Digitialis in the garden.  I love their long-lived, vertical flower stalks.  I love watching bees work their way up into their flowery depths.  In my own garden I use these self-seeding biennials as vertical eye-candy, but I also use their pre-flowering forms as indicators, kinda like coal mine canaries.  For some reason foxglove plants attract cutworms like congressmen attract lobbyists.  And somehow they also seem uniquely adapted to recover and bloom, even after being chewed down to mere nubs.

So, if you have foxgloves growing in your garden, keep an eye out for a sudden spate of holes in their leaves that look like those above.  When they appear in the spring, it may well mean that the cutworms have grown large enough, ravenous enough and numerous enough to do some serious damage.  And that means its showtime, folks:  time for a little cutworm safari.

To organize such a ‘safari’ you’ll need to be willing to get down on your hands and knees, then slowly lift and separate the leaves on each chewed plant.  Look carefully now, cuz’ these camouflaged destructo-larvae seem almost invisible at times, and they find all sorts of ways to line up with the veins on the very leaves they’ve been destroying, and/or roll into small curled balls of possum-playing mock innocence.  Please, do not be fooled by their cuteness.  This is a ploy.

Once you have scoured the area beneath and between the leaves of your chewed plant, you will probably have a collection of juicy little critters in varying sizes and shades, all bearing the same destructive capabilities.  Believe it or not, the cutworms you see above all came from the one Digitalis plant pictured above.  So what do you do with them once you’ve got them?  Well you can always ‘squish’ them, (this is a scientifically accepted term and method of extermination, by the way).  Or, you can take them inside and keep them as pets.  I tended toward this method until I was about ten years old.  My dad does this sort of thing to this very day.  (Check out his pet Black Widows)  Hi Dad!

These days I take a slightly different approach to these captured enemies of my plants.  I send them to Alcatraz  . . . the name I’ve given the rock that sits in the middle of my backyard birdbath.

From Alcatraz, my cutworms are cut off from any plants that they can destroy.  They are also precariously ‘on display’ and utterly available to the numerous robins, jays, sparrows and crows that frequent said birdbath.  “Here birdy, birdy, birdy.”

Strangely enough these short-timers, serving out their life sentences on that rock, seem to feel the need to try to escape.  I’m not exactly sure why, but I suspect that it may be a foreboding sense that they are about to become lunch for one of my backyard birdbath’s frequent winged visitors.  Finger food goes fast on Alcatraz. 

And so, as my feathered friends flit off in search of nesting sites and other meals, I in turn smile in appreciation.  Digested cutworm poop will soon enough rain back down into my garden, completing a sacred cycle.


So it is, and so shall it be.

Parting is such sweet sorrow.

The bloom shots, left and top right corner were taken previously.  It is far too early for these beautiful flower stalks this year.  All the other shots were taken yesterday, in my garden...