SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007

It's been a buggy year. first we learned to our dismay, that the emerald ash borer had finally penetrated the Illinois border, threatening the beauty of our landscape. Then came the 17-year cicadas, a wonder of nature that admittedly can get a bit annoying (this said by a city dweller who never had any cicadas at all and was thrilled to go out to the magazine's office in Downers Grove just to hear what the fuss was all about).

Which got me thinking about bugs in the garden. Frankly, most insects are beneficial - one university extension service I checked puts the number of good guys at 97 percent. So it seems vitally important that we do everything we can to keep them happy.

During my early gardening years, my tomatoes and roses would regularly get aphids, and I blush to confess that the sight of an encrusted stem would send me dashing into the house for some Ortho powder to blast them with. But as time passed and I became besotted with growing as many plants as possible and started introducing some prairie natives, I also began noticing an increasing variety of insects. Monarch and swallowtail and admiral butterflies. Shimmering dragonflies. Big fat-bottomed bumblebees. Moths. Spiders spinning webs. Plus hosts of weird little things I'd never seen before.

And then one day I realized I no longer had an aphid problem. In fact, I really had no insect pests except for the Japanese beetles that I could usually manage to squish into oblivion. One year I spied some striped potato beetles eating the nicotiana leaves, but I squished them too and they never returned. It slowly dawned on me that I had created a little island of biodiversity on my city plot in which I was supplying sustenance for a host of tiny winged creatures. As a result, things were basically in balance.

Gardens are more likely to get problems when our plant palette is limited. Then, when we resort to pesticides, we mainly kill the beneficial insects, the ones that pollinate flowers, fruits and vegetables, the ones that eat that tiny minority of insects that do cause damage. At which point the problems get compounded because the next time a pesky bug arrives, the useful insects are no longer around to do their work, so then we're trapped into applying more pesticides. Talk about not knowing our own self-interest.

Far better to make a point of growing those plants that nourish the beneficial insects - parsley and dill and fennel for the swallowtail butterflies; Joe-Pye weed, prairie liatris, and milkweeds for monarchs; culver's root for bumblebees (especially valuable now that the nation is facing a great die-off of honeybees); coneflowers, New England aster, phlox. Non-natives are useful too. This past spring, the day my first crocus blossom opened, there was a bee, hovering above it.

So bid the cicadas a fond farewell and look forward to their return in 2024. In the meantime, be kind to all their buggy brethren.