I remember when I was a boy I saw them everywhere in the garden and inside our house. They are very shy creatures. They appeared to be doing nothing to plants and sorroundings. So I let them alone also. It maybe and I suspect they are benificial to the environment. Unlike the ones I hear from the tarantula stories who are aggressive, crawl under your blanket while you are sleeping and bite you.

Thanks for the input. I thought about this situation and I've got a new theory. Hear me out... I think the spider population has been growing over the last couple years as a result of the scale problem. First, the river rock mulch has stressed the Holly shrubs, which has made them more vulnerable to scale. The scale produces honeydew. This, in turn, attracts ants to "farm" the honeydew. The spider population has been increasing to feed on the ants. Its kind of like a nasty little eco-system, so to speak. And the timeline is about right since I didn't attack the problem once I originally noticed it two years ago. Plus, I see ants traveling all over the shrubs. So anyway, as an update... I've sprayed high-powered water under most of the holly leaves to dislodge the scale. But I'm hesitant on using horticulture oils now given the sun and heat at this time of year. I'm thinking of just spraying it with the horticulture oil in the late winter/ early spring, when scale is more susceptable. Any thoughts on this? (I'll leave the spiders alone, but not their webs. Our shrubs resemble those of "The Adams Family.")

Yes, Argiope aurantia, one of the spectacular orb weaving spiders. If you want to see her in action, find a live cricket or similar, nothing too big, and toss it into the web.

The rhizome contains genetic information that will duplicate the parent plant. when you take a leaf cutting, the whole reproductive process changes. Just one cell from either I, II, or III will begin the rooting process but that one cell only contains the genetic material coding for whichever layer it comes from. The rhizome contains all of the genetic information from the parent, instead of having to start from scratch at just one type of cell. many African Violets are this way, chimeras. You can reproduce the plant only if you have a full crown (with all the genetic information, including the mutation) but if you take a leaf and try to propagate a new plant, it will not be true to the parent and will lose some of that genetic coding along the way. The cells in the leaves are very simple. They are to do one thing, and one thing only. Now, the cells in the dormant buds contain a different type of cell, one with much more potential than just a leaf cell. imagine it as if the dormant buds are similar to human stem cells, they can grow into almost any type of organ or tissue. Humans can't regenerate limbs (or bodies) so that example has to stop there lol. But with starfish (sea stars!), they can grow a limb back, but if a limb is ripped off, unless it has part of that central core (body), then the arm cells don't have enough genetic information to create a new body. The difference is the TYPE of cell used in starting the plant, whether it's a "stem cell" that holds information for the whole plant or just a leaf cell that is specialized and only holds the genetic information for its layer of leaf cells. That's probably going to be really confusing. It was kind of all over the natural world lol. I love biology though, so I enjoy our conversations!