Wild Ginger

Slugs and snails are nocturnal mollusks that rasp ragged holes in soft leaves, shear off seedlings at ground level, and chew into ripe fruit that touches the soil. They feed at night and in the early morning and spend the day hidden under boards, pots, dense mulch, leaf litter, and low foliage, becoming active in exactly the cool, damp, shaded conditions that suit young plants. Damage is heaviest in wet spells and on tender spring growth: a single wet week can erase a row of seedlings while an established, tough-leaved plant of the same species is barely marked. They lay clusters of small pearly eggs in damp soil and under debris, so a garden with plenty of cover carries a resident population year after year rather than being invaded from outside.

Watch for: Irregular ragged holes chewed out of the middle of leaves and along the edges - not the clean-edged cuts a caterpillar leaves. Seedlings that vanish overnight, or that are cut off at soil level with nothing left behind. Silvery dried slime trails across leaves, soil, pots, and paving in the morning: this is the giveaway that tells you it was mollusks rather than an insect. Chewed pits in ripe fruit, especially where it rests on the ground. Damage that shows up on the lowest, dampest leaves first and gets worse after rain or evening watering. Turn over a board, an upturned pot, or a clump of dense mulch during the day and look for the animals themselves sheltering in the cool underneath.

Prevent: Take away the daytime shelter first: lift boards and upturned pots, clear piles of debris, keep dense mulch pulled back from crowns and stems, and give crowded plantings enough airflow to dry out. Water in the morning rather than the evening so the surface is dry by the time they come out. Copper tape around containers and raised beds gives them a shock they will not cross, and it is the one barrier that reliably works. Get plants past the vulnerable stage quickly - start seedlings in pots and set them out at a decent size rather than direct-sowing into a cold wet bed, since most plants stop being worth defending once the leaves toughen. Leave the ground beetles, frogs, toads, and ground-feeding birds alone, because they eat mollusks all night for free and broad-spectrum slug pellets kill them too. Where thick-leaved or resistant varieties exist for what you are growing, they take far less damage.

Treat: Hand-picking works and costs nothing: go out an hour after dark with a headlamp, drop what you find into soapy water, and repeat nightly for a week or two - persistence is what wins, not any single product. Shallow beer traps sunk to soil level catch them too, but need emptying and refilling daily to be worth anything. Iron-phosphate bait is the standard control and is far lower-risk around pets and wildlife than the old metaldehyde products, but it is not harmless: many formulations include EDTA, and a dog that eats a quantity of pellets can develop iron toxicosis. Scatter it thinly per the label, never in piles, and keep dogs off a baited bed. Clear fallen foliage and debris in autumn, where the eggs are laid. In a wet climate this is a population you manage each season rather than one you eradicate - and on most established plants light grazing is cosmetic and needs nothing at all.

Usually cosmetic on an established mat, and less of an issue on the leathery evergreen Hexastylis types than on the soft deciduous leaves.

Deer are the largest garden problem across much of the country, and where pressure is high they set the limit on what you can grow at all. They browse at night and around dawn and dusk, taking tender shoots, leaves, buds, flowers, and fruit within about five feet of the ground, and they come back night after night to anything they have found and liked. Because they have no upper incisors they tear rather than cut, leaving ragged stem ends - that is how you tell deer damage from a rabbit's clean angled cut. In fall, bucks rub their antlers on young trunks and can strip the bark right around a stem, which kills a young tree outright. Palatability varies enormously between plants and between seasons: a herd short of food in late winter eats things it ignores in June, and no plant is truly deer-proof.

Watch for: Growth cleanly missing overnight, with the plant browsed back to a level line about as high as a deer can comfortably reach. Ragged, torn stem ends rather than the clean angled cut a rabbit leaves - the single most reliable identifier. Buds and flowers gone while the foliage below is untouched, since deer often take the best part first. Hoof prints and droppings in soft ground near the damage. Repeat visits, with fresh damage each morning once a planting has been found. On young trees, shredded and stripped bark and broken low branches in autumn - that is antler rubbing rather than feeding.

Prevent: Fencing is the only thing that reliably works. Eight feet is the standard for excluding deer, or two parallel four-foot fences a few feet apart, which they will not jump because they cannot judge the landing. Short of that, cage individual plants: a sturdy wire cage or trunk guard around every young tree, left on until the trunk is thick and the canopy is above browse height, prevents both browsing and antler rubbing and is the single highest-value thing you can do for a young tree. Repellent sprays do help at moderate pressure, but they wash off and deer habituate, so reapply after rain and rotate between different types through the season. Motion-activated sprinklers, scent deterrents, and noise devices work for a while and then stop. Siting matters too: plants close to the house, in daily traffic, and screened behind other planting get browsed less than the same plant out at the boundary.

Treat: There is no chemical fix, only exclusion and recovery. Get physical protection up immediately after the first damage, because deer return to a known meal, and reinforce or rotate whatever you were relying on before. Most plants regrow from browsing if the crown and roots are intact - feed and water a grazed plant and protect the regrowth while it comes back. What does not recover in the same season is anything whose buds or flowers have been taken, and a young tree whose bark has been rubbed right around the trunk is usually lost. Where deer pressure is genuinely heavy, the honest answer is to fence properly or to grow the plants deer leave alone, rather than to keep replacing losses.

Notably not a problem here: wild ginger's aromatic, aristolochic-acid-rich foliage makes it dependably deer-resistant, so it is a good groundcover choice where deer browse the other shade plants. Nothing is needed - deer typically leave it alone even in high-pressure areas.

Leaf scorch is not a disease and there is nothing to spray for it. It is what happens when a leaf loses water faster than the roots can replace it: the tissue farthest from the veins - the margins and the tips - dries out first and turns brown and papery, and the browning works inward while the rest of the leaf stays green. Hot sun, dry soil, drying wind, heat reflected off paving or a wall, a small or damaged root system, and a plant sited somewhere sunnier or drier than it wants are the usual causes, singly or together. It also happens in winter on evergreens, when bright sun and wind pull water out of the leaves while the ground is frozen and the roots cannot resupply. Shade and woodland plants, shallow-rooted plants, and anything recently planted scorch most easily.

Watch for: Browning that starts at the leaf edges and tips and spreads inward, with a fairly sharp line between the crisp brown tissue and the green that is still healthy. Leaves and fronds going dry, papery, and crisp rather than soft, yellow, or spotted - that is what separates this from a fungal problem. Damage worst on the side of the plant facing the sun or the prevailing wind and on the most exposed upper leaves, while the shaded interior stays fine. Symptoms appearing sharply after a heat wave, a dry spell, or a bright windy week in winter. Whole leaves or fronds shed early as the plant cuts its losses.

Prevent: Site the plant where it actually wants to be. This is a placement problem far more often than a watering problem, and a shade plant in hot afternoon sun will scorch every summer however much you water it. Give shade and woodland plants part-to-full shade and shelter from hot afternoon sun and drying wind. Keep the root zone consistently moist and mulch it well with leaf litter or another organic mulch, which holds water and keeps the roots cool - the single most useful routine step. Water deeply and thoroughly during dry spells rather than little and often, so moisture reaches the whole root zone. Pay particular attention through the first year after planting, when the root system is small and cannot keep up with the leaves. On evergreens in cold regions, make sure the plant goes into winter well watered, and keep it out of bright, windy, exposed positions.

Treat: Water deeply, mulch, and improve the shade - that is the whole treatment, because there is nothing here to kill. Leaves that are already scorched will not recover, so trim off badly browned foliage or fronds for appearance if you want to; the crown and roots are usually unharmed and push out fresh growth once conditions improve. On a plant that scorches badly every year the answer is to move it rather than to keep watering harder, because the siting is what is wrong. Some plants respond well to being cut back hard, which brings a clean flush of new foliage. And on plants that naturally die back or brown off late in the season, scorching at the end of a dry summer is normal and needs nothing at all.

The soft deciduous Canadian wild ginger is especially prone in hot, dry conditions; the evergreen Hexastylis types hold up far better and are the ones to choose in hotter regions. Part-to-deep shade with consistently moist, humus-rich soil and a leaf-litter mulch.