Recovery in the garden

It is now a week since those pesky little bugs invaded my garden and I am sure there are a few of you who are wondering just what sort of devastation is left behind. The pictures I will include in this post will show you that all is well. The dahlias and ground plants have made an amazing recovery - they are still producing flower buds and fresh leaves so I knew that I would not have to wait for very long before I saw an improvement. The crepe myrtle tree had a few little buds that avoided the jaws of the voracious beetles and have provided a faint tinge of colour to the almost stripped tree. This is what it looks like today.

I just wish that I could show you how wonderful it looked before the insects arrived. It was a mass of colour and you couldn't see many of the leaves. Never mind. at least the bugs did not arrive as early as they did a few years ago (they do not swarm like this every year, I have been living here 30 years and this is the third time they have come) That time the flowers had only just appeared and the tree was about a third of the size it is now. This time around we had enjoyed the flowers for about a week and it was when they were at their peak that the bugs arrived.
The dahlias - well I have pulled off the eaten leaves and cut off the dead heads so there is no evidence of their trauma left at all.

Two tubers of these dahlias were given to me by my next door neighbour four years ago and I have lifted them and planted them out each year after giving them time to rest and now I have hundreds of them - if you can see the slope of the path in the background of the top one of these two pictures (click on the photo to make it easier to see) you may be able to see plants beside the post and tree and bush - I have planted even more tubers down that edge of our block. They were planted much later so they will be flowering after these ones in the foreground have finished.
What happened to the rose?

The rose was pruned below the damaged area - it is on the right of this picture, at the front, it has since had two new flowers and you may be able to see the red new growth appearing just above my signature. So the rose has recovered too.
I did despair of my flowering gum. It certainly looked as if the bugs had climbed right inside the cups that hold the flowers and eaten everything - but one branch managed to escape the invaders - incredibly the swarm was in a distinct strip across the garden and some plants were totally unaffected while others were ruined (or so I thought.). Here is the surviving flowering branch of my gum tree (Eucalyptus).

So, with a lighter heart I wander around my garden - there is still the odd beetle to be seen but I am not one to use sprays and the birds and lizards and frogs and things are working hard to keep the garden looking good. We have recently added a huge white crane to the birds that check out my flowering part of the garden and I would imagine that he would eat plenty of bugs and nasties! He would stand as high as the shoulders of my seven year old granddaughter! What a magnificent creature!
AJ