(Published in Jacksonville's Times Union Monday, September 28, 2004)

What's been eating my bushy seedbox?

by Ginny Stibolt

Bushy seedbox, (Ludwigia peruviana) a Florida native and a member of the evening primrose family (Onagraceae), has volunteered all over my yard. In a field where we stopped mowing every week, it’s about 12 inches high on a single stem. It’s much bigger and bushier along the edge of the pond, reaching five feet high. I’ve seen some seedboxes growing along the shores of Lake Asbury that must be more than ten feet tall even though the books say the height ranges from 10 to 36 inches. I guess “they” weren’t thinking about how well plants grow here in Florida.

The pretty, four-petaled yellow flower is almost an inch across on the bigger plants. The ridged, four-sided, hard seed capsule is quite distinctive and gives rise to the common name. Some of my books state that it is used in dried flower arrangements, but either the birds have eaten them or they fall off, because all the capsules are gone in short order around here. If there are any leaves left in the fall, they’ll turn red and I can see some of that coloration already. But the leaves are pretty ratty looking because something’s been eating my bushy seedbox.

Something had been eating all the leaves.
I noticed that something ate all the leaves on one stalk. Upon further inspection, I found two big caterpillars or worms. The green one, a tomato worm that I’m sure many of you have seen, was covered with white braconid wasp larvae. They look like grains of rice sticking straight out like a strange punk hairdo. Organic farmers and gardeners know not to destroy worms with the wasp larvae, because they want those tomato worm predators to flourish. The normal mode for getting rid of tomato worms is to hand pick them. Just look for the eaten leaves; you’ll find them.

I looked up information on the tomato hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata) and found that it has eight stripes and a black horn near its tail end, as opposed to the tobacco hornworm, which has seven stripes and a red horn. Both of these worms take on the color of the plant they are eating and they stay on the underside of the leaves making them hard to see except for the substantial defoliation. The adult phase is a hawk moth. In most areas, the tomato worms go through two life cycles in a year, but in northern Florida, they’ll go through four cycles. So I guess it’s a good thing that the plants are bigger here. Mother Nature has a way of balancing the critters and their food supply.

The sources of information including extension services and universities say with great certainty that the tomato worms will only feed on plants in the tomato family (Solanaceae) which also includes tobacco, petunia, potato, henbane, jimson-weed and of course, deadly nightshade. This is an interesting plant family with weird chemistry and because of its family, Europeans originally thought the tomato was poisonous when early botanical explorers brought it back from the new world. They called it the love apple for its possible aphrodisiac qualities but tomatoes were mostly grown as ornamentals. The Italians started using tomatoes for their sauces first in Europe. The colonists brought tomatoes with them as an ornamental, but Thomas Jefferson served tomatoes at Monticello and in the early 1800’s the Cajuns used tomatoes in their jambalayas. In 1820 when most people still believed them to be poisonous, Colonel Robert Johnson ate a whole bushel of yellow tomatoes. People who came to watch him die on the courthouse steps in Salem, NJ must have been disappointed when he didn’t.

So this tomato worm was slumming on my boring, nicotine-less bushy seedbox and then it was attacked by wasps. It turned yellow and died there on the stem and either fell off or was picked off by a bird because it no longer matched the leaves. Poor worm. Still haven’t identified the other worm, but maybe one of you will know what it is.

The other side of a butterfly garden

If nothing is eating your plants, then you haven’t provided the larvae, the caterpillars or worms, with the food they need before becoming the beautiful adult butterflies or moths. So when something is eating your plants, it’s the other side of growing a butterfly garden. My good friend Lucia Robson back in Maryland grows milkweed on a sunny hill and she cheers when the leaves start disappearing–the monarch caterpillars will eat only the bitter leaves thus protecting the whole species from the blue jays. A functioning butterfly garden won’t be perfectly pristine, but as a complete ecosystem the plants and animals coexist and it will look raggedy around the edges.

I asked a manager of a garden shop if he stocked Florida native plants and species to attract butterflies. He told me that they were too hard to sell because something always ate the foliage so he’d carry only the plants that looked good on the shelf so people would buy them–mostly aliens. How sad is that? Perhaps some educational information and better marketing would help. How about if he offered free caterpillars to his customers? Hmm…

Here are a couple of links to information on creating butterfly gardens:
http://www.nsis.org/butterfly/butterfly.html, http://butterflywebsite.com/butterflygardening.cfm.

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Ginny Stibolt is a naturalist and a gardener with a Masters degree in Plant Taxonomy. She’d like to hear from readers who have suggestions and questions. After all there are more than a few transplanted gardeners here in northeast Florida trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t in planting zone 8/9. You may contact her or read more of her articles posted on her website: www.transplantedgardener.com.