Winners and Losers in a Garden of Change
September 5th, 2023
The only thing certain about gardening is that things change.

Everything changes in the garden when these come along.
Don’t ever think you’ve got gardening figured out because this is a moving target if ever there was one.
The environment around us changes.
New bugs show up.
New plants come and others go.
The weather changes – sometimes minute by minute.
And about the time you devise some kind of airtight strategy or timing, something changes (four-legged or otherwise) to make you rethink it.
We’ve had a lot of rethinking to do lately. Change seems to be happening faster than ever. (Of course, this also could be a sign that I’m getting old.)
Just in the few decades I’ve been gardening, lots of really significant garden-altering changes have happened.
I remember when gypsy moths (now known as “spongy moths”) came along to decimate oaks and cause a disgusting “rain” to fall on hikers.
Then we saw our state tree, the hemlock, attacked by cottony bugs called woolly adelgids, followed by marmorated stink bugs that invaded our houses in winter, emerald ash borers that killed off virtually all of our ash trees, and most recently the spotted lanternfly that’s swarmed into our yards in Biblical proportions.
New diseases keep coming just as fast.