Willow

Cage or tube young plants and live stakes for the first few years; an established coppiced willow simply grows back thicker.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A native willow in damp open ground rarely suffers badly - if yours does every year, look at crowding, airflow, and species choice before reaching for a spray.

Young leaves turning black or brown and dying within days of opening, still hanging on the twig rather than dropping cleanly - the classic sign, and it looks like frost damage or a late freeze. Olive-brown velvety spore growth on the underside of dead leaves along the midrib. Shoot tips wilting and bending over into a shepherd's crook, then blackening. Dark, sunken, sometimes cracked lesions on twigs and small branches, occasionally weeping. Repeated dieback of the outer canopy year after year on the same plant, with the tree progressively thinning from the tips inward.

Prune out affected shoots and cankered twigs in dry weather, cutting back into clearly healthy wood and sterilizing the blade between cuts, then bag or burn the material rather than composting it. Clear fallen leaves thoroughly. On an established willow that is otherwise healthy, that plus a dry summer is usually the end of it - the plant refoliates and recovers. Fungicides are used in nurseries but are not practical or worthwhile on a garden tree, and they will not rescue a plant that keeps getting hit because of its site. A willow that blights heavily several years running is telling you it is in the wrong place or the wrong climate; replacing it with a regional native species is the durable fix.

Airflow and dryness at the foliage are what limit it. Space plants generously rather than crowding a wet corner, thin a dense crown in winter so the canopy dries after rain, and avoid overhead watering. Rake and remove fallen leaves and prunings in autumn rather than leaving them under the plant, since the fungus overwinters in that debris and in infected twigs. Choose species suited to your region and site - a willow in ground that is too dry, or a weeping willow in a humid climate, is the one that suffers - and do not overfeed, since soft nitrogen-forced growth is more susceptible. Buy clean nursery stock and check new plants for blackened twigs before planting.

Two fungal diseases that often arrive together on willow and are usually described as one problem. Willow scab infects the young leaves as they open in a cool wet spring, killing them quickly and running down the leaf stalk into the shoot; black canker follows on the weakened wood, forming dark sunken lesions on twigs and small branches. Together they blacken and kill the current season's growth, and a badly affected tree can look scorched by early summer. Wet springs drive it; dry springs make it a non-event. Native willows in the ground they like usually shrug it off and refoliate, while weeping willows, crowded plantings, and stressed or overwatered nursery stock take it hardest and can be killed by repeated years of it.

On an established willow this is cosmetic and needs nothing - and spraying a plant grown to feed several hundred caterpillar species defeats the entire point of having it. Hand-pick on a small or newly planted willow only.

Clusters of shiny metallic beetles massed together on the upper, sunniest foliage and down inside open blooms, heaviest on warm sunny afternoons from around late June. Leaves reduced to lace, with the veins left intact and the tissue between them gone - unmistakable, and quite different from the ragged chewing of a caterpillar. Ragged, chewed petals and blooms that never open properly. Beetles that let go and drop straight to the ground when you disturb the plant. Feeding damage on ripening fruit, on the plants they also take fruit from. Whole branches going brown and lacy at the top of a plant while the shaded lower growth stays untouched.

Persistent morning hand-picking into soapy water is the most effective home control there is, and on a vigorous established plant the damage is usually cosmetic and needs nothing else. Neem deters feeding rather than killing, and has to be reapplied. For heavy pressure, spinosad or a targeted insecticide labeled for the plant will work - but time any spray away from bloom and apply it at dusk to protect bees, and observe the pre-harvest interval on anything you eat. On flowering plants, some gardeners simply shear the blooms off for a couple of weeks and let the plant rebloom once the wave has passed, which removes the lure as well as the damage. Young plants and young trees are the ones worth defending: a mature tree or an established vine tolerates several weeks of leaf loss without lasting harm.

Hand-picking is genuinely the main defense in a home garden. Go out in the cool of the morning while the beetles are sluggish, hold a tub of soapy water underneath, and knock them in - they drop when disturbed, so most fall straight into it. Do it daily through the flight: because the beetles call each other in, taking them off early stops a plant becoming a beacon. Do not put pheromone or lure traps anywhere near the garden - they demonstrably pull in far more beetles than they catch. And do not count on lawn grub control: milky spore has performed poorly and inconsistently in field trials across most of the US, and treating your own turf does not reduce the adults feeding on your plants, because they fly in from surrounding properties. Where it is practical, row cover or netting through the peak flight excludes them outright. Otherwise riding out the six-to-eight-week wave is a legitimate strategy, since most established plants absorb the damage.

Japanese beetles are metallic green-and-copper beetles about half an inch long that emerge in early summer and feed for six to eight weeks. They feed in aggregating masses - one beetle's feeding releases a scent that draws in more - so a plant goes from untouched to covered in a couple of days. They chew the soft tissue between the leaf veins and leave the veins standing, so the leaf ends up as a brown lace skeleton, and they shred open flowers and sometimes ripening fruit as well. They work the sunniest upper parts of a plant on warm afternoons. The white C-shaped grubs spend the rest of the year in turf and pasture soil eating grass roots, and the adults then fly in from wherever they hatched, which can be some distance away.