Agapanthus midge
Guernsey Donkey2
Posts: 6,713
in Plants
Agapanthus midge has reached the island. Headline news today. We have quite a few in our garden - they grow like weeds in hedges, waste land etc. so it will be devastating to see them dying off. Has anyone experienced this problem with their Agapanthus? It seems that there is no cure apart from destroying the plants. I will check our plants tomorrow.
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Surely if you remove the whole flower head as soon as you see them, you'll get rid? Or have I missed some salient point? Nowt new there though.
Mercifully I've not seen any so far.
We have been advised to remove the flower heads if the gall midge is attacking the plant. At present there is no known cure but the RHS is working on a control. The symptoms are deformity in the plants shape, discolouration and rotten flower buds. Maggots can be found inside the buds. Sounds nasty. Let's hope we don't get it in our garden.
Update on the agapanthus gall midge. It now appears that it has invaded our garden, although thankfully not all flowers are affected. There is no known cure for it according to the RHS, which is a pity although we are not sure whether it lives on in the plant after we have cut the affected flowers off.
My understanding is, that it's life cycle is in the flower itself. I read RHS advice to burn infected flower heads,to interrupt the breeding cycle. but the plants should be ok.
Again, I might well be wrong.
Mercifully none spotted here to date.
Well that is a relief Hostafan - it would be a pity to have to watch the whole plants deteriorate over the coming years. We will be going out with our secateurs tomorrow to remove the heads that are affects and as you say burn them or dispose of a black sack.
We are now on the local floral and RHS mail lists as updates are published.
I don't know how it came here to the island or to our garden, we have never bought an agapanthus plant and they have all spread through seeds (or do they spread underground?). We have far too many of them in our garden.
Think we might have it, or is this fasciation?
I can't tell Keenongreen, do you have whole dead flower heads? On some of our flower heads approx. 50% of the flowers are normal and the other half of the flowers are brown. We couldn't find a single bug/midge creature on any of the dead or affected flowers strangely. If you want to check them out take a look at the RHS site.
This is not what I want to hear. I love my Agapanthus.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'
I couldn't find any bugs but one of our pots, with 5 Agapanthus in it, has multiple seriously deformed flower heads in it. I'll have to take a closer look. If I find any bugs I'll post a photo.
Having to remove the flower heads to stop the disease rather spoils the point of growing them.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/science/science-blogs/science/June-2017/agapanthus-gall-midge
I certainly would not introduce any new ones for the time being.
'You must have some bread with it me duck!'