Puny creatures, tremble before your destroyer!
The unfortunate thing about trying to keep a garden in shape is the number of battles in which one gets involved.

Mum gave me a lovely little rose bush for my birthday. "It's disease resistant," she advised me. Not being that green of finger, I took this to mean it would be relatively low maintenance - regular watering and feeding during summer, maybe the odd bit of dead-heading, but otherwise something that could be left to its own devices.

Oh no.

Having been back to Wales for a long, hot weekend, I thought my garden was in need of a little attention. Most of the rose bush's flowers had died as a combined result of the sun and the fact that they'd come to the end of their natural life. So this morning's task was the removal of dessicated blooms.

Something else didn't look quite right, though. Didn't the bush used to have more leaves? Looking closer, I found the little culprit responsible - green, squirmy and enjoying a feast of foliage.

And he wasn't alone. Why dine on your own when you can throw a party? Upon thorough inspection I found dozens of the little buggers had stripped several of the branches as good as bare. Evidently I was facing the massed ranks of the caterpillar army.

So dead-heading became bug-chasing, as I scoured the rose bush for my herbivorous foes, picking them off and throwing them onto the decking for birds to find, or maybe for an appointment with the frog/toad/amphibious thing that seems to be resident in my garden (of whom more another time, hopefully). But eventually, much like sniffer dogs with drugs, a kind of caterpillar blindness develops, and the initial sharpness fades. Even so, by the end of the session about 50 had been forcibly evicted.

And still I can't be sure I got all of them, can't be sure that my rambling rose will be allowed to recover without the threat of being eaten alive. I read the Very Hungry Caterpillar enough times as a child to appreciate the scale of the appetite I'm facing. And why can't they eat something ugly and useless like weeds? Why does it have to be the pretty, delicate stuff that gets devoured?

Yet, knowing that the caterpillars are just following the course of their nature as flutterbys-in-waiting, I can't help but feel a little guilty. I didn't squish the little critters, but by separating them from food and camouflage I can't deny being guilty of conspiracy to murder. Genocide, even. Insecticide!

But what else can I do? It's them or me.

In the words of another great bug hunter, I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.