She couldn’t recall its name but said: “It was beautiful with variegated green and yellow leaves, and one day it was fine, and the next it was completely dead!” Jane had noticed in the days running up to its mysterious demise that it was covered in what looked like cobwebs, and then when it had died and she looked closer, she realised it was infested with caterpillars. With the help of her husband, they dug up the sad tree, chopped it up and disposed of it in her green waste bin, at the same time as picking off and exterminating as many caterpillars as they could find. They both love animals and nature and weren’t happy at permanently getting rid of the creatures but reasoned that if they can destroy a whole shrub overnight, they cannot be a good thing to have in your garden.
Sentimentality went out of the window. I asked what the caterpillars looked like, and wondered which butterfly or moth they would eventually turn into. Jane showed me her bin with the remains of the brown and withered shrub and there were dozens of the critters still crawling around it.
The caterpillars were a couple of inches long with green and black stripes and a black head, and clearly, they hadn’t managed to capture all of them. Well, this is the kind of murder mystery that the Countryman’s Daughter thrives upon, and as soon as I got back home, I donned my detective hat and set to work. It took me a good minute of eager Googling to crack the case wide open.
Jane’s plant had been slaugh.