The Plant Ecologist

Have you seen this in your yard? 🕸️

Those silky webs showing up in your cherry, crabapple, or pecan trees aren't spiders. They're eastern tent caterpillars!

The tent gets rebuilt every single day, fresh silk added and angled toward the sun to keep the caterpillars warm and hidden from birds while they're too small to defend themselves. If you want them gone, skip the spray. Just tear the tent open with a stick. Birds take care of the rest.

They'll strip a tree bare for a few weeks, and a healthy tree just leafs back out by summer. By June or July these guys have already pupated into a reddish brown moth, and then they're gone until next year's eggs hatch.

Mostly harmless, mostly misunderstood, and honestly one of the better excuses to stand outside and watch the birds work.

Save this for next spring, and drop a comment if you've got a tent in your yard right now. 👇

New in the shop: magnetic pin backs! 🧲

Now every enamel pin you own can double as a magnet AND a pin. Just pop the magnetic back on when you want to display it on your fridge, locker, or magnet board, then swap back to a regular pin back whenever you want to wear it again.

Same pin, twice the versatility. No more choosing between wearing it and displaying it.

Rubber body, strong metal magnet inside, fits any standard enamel pin post. Pins sold separately!Link in bio to shop 🌿

Or comment “Magnet” and I’ll DM you the link!

Your feed is probably full of "murder hornet in NC" panic this week. Let's separate the science from the scare — this is worth taking seriously, just not for the reason most posts are saying. 🐝👇

The murder hornet was declared eradicated in the US back in 2024. What just showed up near Charlotte is a different species: the yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina). It's not a bigger sting risk than the wasps already living in your yard. The real target is honeybees. This hornet hunts them right at the hive entrance and can collapse a colony fast — which is a real concern for beekeepers and for the wild pollinator populations that hold our local ecosystems together.

Swipe through for the myth vs. fact breakdown, then save this for the next time your neighborhood group starts spiraling.

Think you've spotted one? Photograph it if you can do so safely, then report it to NCDA&CS at ncagr.gov/YLH. Beekeepers, keep an eye on your hives for hawking behavior, hornets hovering at the entrance to pick off returning bees. And leave any nest removal to the professionals, don't try to knock one down yourself.

Early reports are how this stays contained. Save this post and share it with a beekeeper or a neighbor who's already worried.

Sources: NCDA&CS (ncagr.gov/news/press-releases/2026/07/27/ncdacs-confirms-first-finding-yellow-legged-hornet-state-asks-beekeepers-watch-predator-hornet), NC State Extension Growing Small Farms (growingsmallfarms.ces.ncsu.edu/news/invasive-yellow-legged-hornet-confirmed-in-north-carolina)

Most yards only have one layer. Forests have five. Canopy, understory, shrub, herbaceous, and groundcover: build all five and your garden holds up on its own. A canopy tree filters light and sets the mood for everything underneath it. An understory tree or tall shrub fills the next level down. Below that, shrubs add structure that holds the garden together even after perennials die back for the year. The herbaceous layer is where the flowers and grasses live, doing most of the color and texture work through the growing season. Groundcover finishes it off, covering bare soil so weeds have nowhere to take hold. Save this and check your yard: which layer are you missing?

That one lonely shrub in the corner of your yard? Plant two more. Odd numbers, like three or five of the same plant, read as natural. A single plant reads as an accident. Your eye organizes even numbers into pairs and looks for a missing match. Odd numbers can’t split that way, so they settle into one cohesive group instead. This is why professional gardens rarely use single specimens scattered around a yard. The same plant shows up again and again in groups. Pick one or two anchor plants and repeat them in groups of three, five, or seven throughout your beds. Past about seven, exact numbers stop mattering. At that point you’re not planting a group anymore, you’re planting a drift. Save this before your next nursery run. Buy three, not one.

Your lawn doesn’t need to cover the whole yard. Picture turf as a rug instead of wall-to-wall carpet. A rug has edges. It goes under a specific piece of furniture, in a specific room, because you put it there on purpose. Wall-to-wall carpet just covers everything by default, and that’s basically how most yards get planted.

Grass only where you actually walk, sit, or let the dog out. Everything else can become a planting bed instead, which cuts down on mowing, watering, and fertilizing.

Start small. Mark out the beds you want first and let the lawn fill in whatever space is left over. You can expand the beds more each season instead of tearing everything out at once, and the edges don’t have to be perfect right away.

Save this one. It’s the first post in a garden design series I’m doing, more coming soon.

Seeing a bug on your plants doesn’t mean it’s time to reach for a pesticide. Integrated Pest Management starts with identifying the problem and monitoring how bad it actually is. Treatment happens after scouting confirms real damage at a level that matters, not on a fixed schedule. Physical controls like hand-picking, barriers, and pruning come first. Biological controls, such as beneficial insects, are next. Chemical treatment is a targeted last resort, used only when it’s actually needed. Save this before your next spray day. Scout first, treat last.

I found this hanging off my persimmon tree this week: the early instar of a regal moth caterpillar, aka the “hickory horned devil.” Full grown, it’s one of the largest caterpillars in North America.

All of its eating happens in this stage, and only on a short list of native trees: persimmon, walnut, hickory, and sumac. Once it becomes an adult, it has no functional mouthparts at all. It lives about a week, running entirely on what it stored as a caterpillar, with one job: reproduce.

If you’ve got persimmon, hickory, or sumac in your yard, you might already be hosting one without knowing it. National Moth Week runs July 18 to 26, and Carolina Beach State Park has a free Moth Night Out on July 24, 8:30 to 10 PM, with NC Wildlife Federation.

Add your sightings to iNaturalist this week! Follow for more. 🌿🦋

The spotted lanternfly is already established in North Carolina. This inch-long planthopper feeds on more than 70 plant species, including grapevines, hops, maples, and walnut, and its sugary honeydew leaves sooty mold on everything nearby, per the NC Department of Agriculture. Its favorite host is Tree of Heaven, itself an invasive tree common along roadsides. NCDA&CS has confirmed established populations in seven counties: Forsyth, Guilford, Rockingham, Caldwell, Davidson, Rowan, and Caswell, all in the north-central Piedmont. It hasn’t reached the coast yet, so early detection matters. See one? Scrape egg masses into soapy water and report sightings to NCDA&CS at ncagr.gov/SLF.

Less than 1% of moth species actually eat clothing. The other 11,000+ species in the U.S. are pollinating your garden after dark — and doing it faster than bees, according to research out of the University of Sussex.

Take the luna moth. Adults don't even have working mouthparts — they live about a week with one job, and everything they'll ever eat happened as a caterpillar, on a short list of native trees. In coastal NC that's usually persimmon, along with sweetgum and hickory. No host tree, no caterpillar, no moth.

National Moth Week is July 18–26. Carolina Beach State Park has a free Moth Night Out on July 24, 8:30–10 PM with NC Wildlife Federation — or just set up a porch light and a white sheet and see who shows up. Log what you find on iNaturalist.
Save this for moth week, and tag someone who still blames every moth for the holes in their sweaters.