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Help me identify this worm on my DA roses!

8 years ago

I have two each of Lady of Shallot and Chaucer, both David Austins.

This is their first summer in my house(I planted them bare rooted last winter). So it's about 6 months old.

Now my husband and I were on a holiday for last 3 weeks. When we came back, I started seeing these worms all over my roses. They are really tiny and took me a lot of inspections to figure out what is destroying my roses. They eat leaves, stems, buds and have left my rose plant looking rather unappealing.

Please help me identify this worm so I can get rid of it. I hand picked quite a lot of these just so that I could avoid any sprays but I guess I will have to find another way round. If you have any methods or products to suggest, please do.

Here are a lot of pictures to help you identify them.

TIA

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Comments (3)

Patty W. zone 5a Illinois
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Photos 1, 4 and 5 are rose slugs are rose slugs. If you have predators they will eat them if not I pick and squish.

No. 2 is a larger worm, katydid, grasshopper ect.

The 2nd photo up from the bottom looks like thrips damage.

No. 3 is also a chewing insect

No. 2 I have no idea.

The last photo reminds me of rose midge damage but I'm really unsure. If it was a chewing insect it will be back for the other buds until its caught. Maybe thrips damage. In other words I'm guessing on that one.
dublinbay z6 (KS)
8 years ago
For the rose slugs, pick and squish while you wait for the good predator bugs to show up and gobble them down. They usually come a couple weeks after the rose slugs appear--unless you have been spraying insecticides in the past and therefore killed off most of the "good guys" also. In which case, pick and squish.

As for the other pics, I don't really know, but I do know that in my garden, some of those things are passing problems, so I don't worry a lot about some of them.

However, it does help to dead-head the blooms that have finished blooming--makes the whole plant look neater.

Kate
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User
8 years ago
I agree you have more than one pest. The little rose slug caterpillar will skeletize leaves until time to drop to the ground and do the next stage of its life. My Colette attracts the moths that lay those eggs so she has dozens of baby rose slugs in the spring. Impossible for me squish. I use a systemic once to keep the numbers down. Mine have sucessive generations.

I don't know what has chomped your buds. Earwigs are another pest I have. And they do eat flower buds of pansies. I deadheaded roses yesterday and there were earwigs in some of the blooms. Grasshoppers also go after the roses.

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