Emma Townshend: Summer queries from salivating snails to short-stemmed sweet peas

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The summer months for me have recently become a running cavalcade of smartphone pictures showing other people's dodgy garden issues. "What's this?" someone texts, with a pic of a gorgeous, shiny black-green beetle attached. "It was on my lavender." It's rosemary beetle, I reply, and you should squish it and its whole family, or it'll eat the lot. (Rosemary beetle is up there in Britain's top five pests, most years, according to the RHS, and that's at least partly because it is so rapacious, stripping whole bushes before you notice their slick, dazzling bodies lined up along the inner branches.)












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