The root aphid is a nuisance. I found it on a large pot of Watsonia pillansii that I was intending to turf out into the gravel planting of spiky things and exotics, having seen how well all the other Watsonia I'd already planted outside was doing. Watsonia are South African plants, common names Bugle Lily or Beatrice watsonia according to the Garden Museum, though I'd never heard it called by either of those. I raised my plants from seed, which germinated easily enough, and initially kept my stock in pots because I didn't think they'd necessarily make it through the UK winters outside. I made up one large terracotta pot's worth, which went to stand with the dahlias over the summer, and the other plants remained in 2 litre pots in the greenhouse while I tried to work out what to do with them.
The plants in the greenhouse produced a few agreeable tall spikes of apricot coloured tubular flowers, but didn't look altogether happy with life in their pots, and last year I tried planting some out in the gravel. They came through the winter, which was admittedly milder than we've had in recent years, and by spring looked so much better than the ones left in the greenhouse that I planted them out as well. Meanwhile, the ones in the terracotta pot bloomed last summer, but not enough to justify their space under glass over the winter, and I decided to go whole hog and plant them out as well. Which is when I found they had root aphid.
I dosed the rootball with a Provado drench, and will plant it out tomorrow. The manager at the plant centre used to say that root aphid was not such an issue in the open ground as it is in pots, so I hope that the Watsonia will outgrow the problem, and that will be the end of that, as far as it is concerned. Meanwhile, I also found root aphid on some nameless things which I think are some species of sedum, cadged from a gardening friend, and which I would be terrified of if I weren't proposing to plant them in quite such an arid and inhospitable place. They got treated. A gazania I raised from seed, which has been hanging around in its pot for ages, and which proved to have lurid yellow flowers when it finally bloomed, went in a sack of material destined for the dump, when I found it too had aphid.
I am forced to the reluctant conclusion that I will have to work my way through the greenhouse, checking everything and treating or chucking it as appropriate. It will certainly concentrate my mind on whether I have any actual use for each plant, as the Provado drench is expensive. I will have to learn my lesson, and let you take it as an awful warning, to treat early signs of root aphid in a greenhouse as seriously as the first signs of clothes moth damage in your house. It is not safe to assume that it is an isolated incident, and that now you have thrown away the affected plant, or garment, it has gone away. It hasn't, and will probably get worse unless you track the infection to its source and deal with it.
Addendum We did not stay up to watch the football. The first news I heard on Radio 4, when I pottered down to the kitchen this morning and put the radio on, was a doleful announcement that it was the end of the World Cup for Gary Lewin. I'd never heard of Gary Lewin, but assumed he was one of the England team. Later on I discovered what had actually happened, which was that the England physio twisted his ankle jumping up and down to celebrate the team's one goal in their first match, which they lost. That just about sums up English football. I hope the announcers on Radio 3 are not going to feel compelled to keep mentioning the World Cup as often as they did today, but I fear that they will. The new controller still hasn't been named (unless Google is hiding the news very carefully) but with any luck he or she will act swiftly to counteract the embarrassing standing instruction left by the departed Roger Wright for presenters to try to be hip and down with the kids. The overlap between people who listen to Radio 3 and people who have any interest at all in football is almost certainly vanishingly small.
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