Now that I’m shut out of the garden by frost, I’ve been spending time with a newly acquired book, Whitney Cranshaw’s Garden Insects of North America: The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Bugs (Princeton University Press, 2004, $29.95). This is a big book with a modest price, and has excellent colour pictures of just about everything crawling and flying around your garden, including crickets, katydids, fruit flies, mealy bugs, moths, maggots, borers, aphids, ants and bees. The author describes more than 1,400 species, with comments on their favourite foods and habits. Cranshaw is an entomologist and the titles of his two previous volumes, Pests of the West and Bagging Big Bugs, suggest he might be both helpful and a lot of fun.
Straight away the book had me feeling sentimental for the sweet little cabbage butterflies (in the whites and sulfurs Pieridae family) that flit and flutter about the garden, looking for broccoli, Brussels sprouts or anything related to cabbage that could be a suitable base for laying their eggs. (If you grow ornamental cabbage and kale, you’ll be familiar with their green caterpillar larvae stage that can eat whole leaves overnight.) The adult-form butterflies with white wings bearing a characteristic dark spot are emblematic of high summer when they may duke it out in territorial conflict over choice nectar-rich blossoms. In my garden, they’re particularly eager for the flowers of golden oregano.
This is a good book for identifying insects, caterpillars, their eggs and the damage they can cause. It’s also informative in settling simple, yet irksome questions like, of the 550 species of grasshoppers in North America, how many feed on garden plants? Answer: only four will consider eating an ornamental plant—the twostriped, differential, migratory and redlegged grasshoppers (pictures are in the book). The other 546 grasshopper species are just minding their own business. As well, I’ve been concerned about new and unknown lady bugs (or lady beetles) with tan backs and fewer black spots than red lady bugs have. Are these alien intruders? No, they’re part of the nearly 200 species of lady bugs on the continent, which also includes the pink spotted and twicestabbed lady beetles, certainly exotic by any standard. The little tan ones are multi-coloured Asian lady beetles, with dual U.S and Canadian citizenship. Well, that’s a relief.
Other posts by Judith this week:
Posts by Judith last week:
Hi Jodi (Dec. 29),
You will enjoy this book! For instance, if you’ve wondered what a lightning bug looks like in daytime, when it’s inactive and unlit, well, there’s a picture. And the story of the Ips engraver beetles is quite charming. The males make their tunnel nursery galleries under the bark of most pine and spruce species, with a nuptial chamber to attract females. Too sweet, and their activities aren’t usually fatal to the trees. You’ll find them on page 496, along with information on how to detect their presence. It’s satisfying to read about the artful ways of insects, without the urge to obliterate them.
— Judith
Thanks for this, Judith. I used to have a terrific book of insects via Rodale, way back when, but it got lost somewhere along the way. I think I’ll give myself a little post-Christmas treat and order this book, even though I have pretty much a laissez-faire attitude towards bad insects, and plant our gardens to encourage good insects such as bees, ladybugs, and so on. I just like learning more about them, and Entomology class was much longer ago than I would like to admit.
Hi Terry,
Thanks so much for letting me know about the Prairie Gardener’s Book of Bugs: A Guide to Living With Common Garden Insects, I’m sure there will be readers eager to find a copy of this. The authors, Norah Bryan and Ruth Stahl, are both members of the Calgary Horticulture Society and discuss more than 100 familiar insects creeping around in lawns and beds. This is a useful reference book for every province in Canada.
— Judith
Hi Jane,
I wish certain insects (like Japanese beetles) would respect international border lines, but unfortunately they don’t! All the insect pests found in Ontario gardens also appear throughout the region, and surrounding provinces and states. I don’t know of a book limited exclusively to Ontario, but perhaps another reader will make a suggestion. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs maintains an extensive website, and includes The Online Gardener’s Handbook 2010, the first chapter of which deals with garden insects, and you can see it here: http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/gardbk/gh-ch1-1iplinj.htm . Although there are no identifying pictures, the information is good. From that page, you can use the search box to look up individual insects, such as earwig or euonymus scale, and find a fact sheet. This might be a useful resource for you.
— Judith
A wonderful reference for bugs/pets on plants on the Prairies is called The Prairie Gardener’s Book of Bugs, authored by Nora Bryan and Ruth Stahl, published by Fifth House Ltd. It’s trade paperback with excellent photos and useful info. Check out a bookstore and know it will help you, Judith.
The insect book sounds good but I would much prefer an insect book that was published in Canada and covered the bugs in my back yard. I don’t want to have to read about a bug that I might not encounter in my yard or in my country. Is there a book that deals with Canadian or Ontario bugs? Thanks, Jane
A good book on Ontario bugs is Garden Bugs of Ontario by Foster, Fry, Macaulay and published by Lone Tree Publishing, http://www.lonepinepublishing.com/cat/9781551055084
Pretty easy to find—a lot of their books are actually in the Canadian Tire stores.
Hi Emma (March 4),
Thanks for the information about Garden Bugs of Ontario. We’re soon going to need it!
— Judith
Hi Michael,
I understand your frustration with controlling insects that damage ornamental plants. The book has an interesting chapter (containing 26 pages) on management principles for some garden pests, and it’s suitably comprehensive. The approach taken is to describe the conditions and elemental, organic materials that pests most dislike, and also the categories of chemical pesticides that might be used for control. It doesn’t cite brand names of pesticides, but gives the chemical categories that could be sourced in any garden centre where pesticides are sold. This is useful information; and the illustrated insect identification information is quite valuable. It’s always necessary to identify an insect before selecting a control. Hope this helps.
— Judith
The article on insects and the insect book would be more useful if it told us whether the book dealt with how to control garden pests.