More garden pests

Not so much 'more garden pests' but 'more pests in the life of a plant display maintainer'. Fortunately we don't come across too many pests, but the first incident other than the common or garden greenfly was when one of the girls that worked for me let out a shriek while changing over a large plant in an office. "I've just seen a large beetle in the soil", she said. Thinking it would be a wood louse or something equally innocuous, I dug in to the soil in the plant container only to find an odd looking beetle that looked slightly exotic. I captured it and placed in to a plastic cup when "Oh look, it has a family!" They joined the first one in the cup and were duly packaged off to the Natural History Museum in London.

The museum will happily accept crawling donations, preferably alive, to add to their collection. In return they will identify it for you. It used to be a free service and I think it still is for private individuals but if it a business related find then a charge is made.


It turned out that the creature was a Surinam cockroach. They are not considered pests as they don't usually set up home inside buildings and according to Wikipedia often arrive in houseplants. They were the only ones I have ever seen in nearly 30 years of business.

The next pest incident was originally thought to be a pest of a different kind. A member of staff kept asking why the security guards in one of our buildings were nibbling her apples that were left in the van. The van keys were always left with security. The guards kept telling her that they didn't do it but as they said it with a smile on their faces, she didn't really believe them.I had a box of Christmas decorations in the back of their van and opened it one day only to find that some of the decorations had been shredded.

This puzzled me for a while until it dawned on me that the secret nibbler could well be whatever is nestling in the box. I took all the decorations out and found the tiny apple lover, a field mouse, at the bottom!

It was well over a year ago that I opened up a packet of tropical flowers in an office when a small pink frog jumped out. Using the trusty plastic cup method again, I captured it and put it on an overgrown grass verge in a nearby car park. Returning to the office, I opened up another packet of tropicals and lo and behold another frog! Sadly, this one was dead. One of the cleaners that worked at the building came from South America. He was nearby when I took the frog outside. Shortly afterwards, I saw him rubbing his bosses pen on the back of the frog. Goodness knows why the cleaner would have even touched the pen as it was always in his boss’s mouth!

One week I found a leech in some tropicals. I quickly sent it surfing down the toilet in case it had Nile fever or something. I was in the tropical flower department of one of my suppliers a week ago. Two of the guys that work there were looking at something in a jar. "What is it?" I asked. " A tropical spider" they replied. As I looked at it, I asked whether they were sure it was tropical as I had one like it riding along in the cab of my van a short while ago. I could see it was the same type by the way it tucked it's legs neatly together. " It's definitely tropical!" came the reply. Hmm.
I tried to look up that type of spider on the internet and came up with a possibility: the Nursery Web Spider. Without seeing one again I can’t be too sure but my passenger had its legs together in a similar way to the one in the picture. It’s an image I found on Google, that’s not my tyre it’s resting on!

Just as you can misdiagnose your symptoms on the net and think you have Parkinson’s AND Motor Neurone disease when in fact you have just been gardening too strenuously, you can also wrongly identify creatures. For a while I though my friend might be a Brazilian wandering spider due to an image having that description on it. I don’t think it is after all but reading how poisonous the Brazilian spider is I got a little paranoid. Rinsing some dishes, I saw some large spider legs coming up through the bubbles, then realised it was a stem from some grapes! Phew!

I'm not normally concerned about spiders and will happily pick them up. My lack of fear is all down to a boy I went to school with: Dennis Hall. He was showing the girls a spider he had in his hand and not to be outdone, I picked one up too. It was only later on that I realised Dennis's spider was a dead one!