No Mow Anytime - Caterpillar galore

While I started mowing the lawn around the end of June I was careful to mow around most of the flowers in the garden. I must have been a very comical sight. (Sometimes I use scissors).

There has been a large nettle bush that I left growing because it seemed to attract so many insects (mostly ladybirds). But came August and it was getting out of hand and it got so big. It even got in the way to the front door and the postman was in danger of getting stung!

So one day I set to cut it down. The bug season has ended, I thought. It will be fine, I thought. How wrong I was! Thankfully before I could start cutting it down I spotted a beautiful caterpillar on it and soon I found another three.

I did an internet search and discovered that they were the larvae of the comma butterfly. There was no chance I’d cut that nettle down anytime soon! I instead got a cane and tied it up so the postman could pass by it unscathed. 

From then on we checked on the caterpillars every day - they were well camouflaged so it was always difficult to find them. Until one day we truly couldn’t find them. All we saw were nettle leaves, fresh and dry. Or were they…?? You guessed it, the cocoon of the comma butterfly mimics a dry nettle leaf. We found all four butterflies cocooned up. 

On the same day, we found our precious kale plants falling victim to a handful of cabbage white butterfly larvae. They were not AS welcome as the comma caterpillars were, nevertheless, we left them be and waited for them to cocoon themselves

And incredibly on the afternoon of this very day as we were clearing our allotment, (not by choice, we were threatened of being evicted if we didn’t tidy it) we found the most amazing caterpillar on a “weed”. We’ve seen one before so we knew what it was: the larvae of the elephant hawk moth. We don’t go to the allotment every day so unfortunately we lost sight of it but we hope it’s happily cocooning somewhere and growing into a beautiful moth.