In article , Janet Baraclough
writes
The message
from Lynda Thornton contains these words:

Hi

I planted a fairly large bronze phormium earlier in the summer and just
the other day noticed that it looked as though it had lost some leaves,
almost half in fact! On closer inspection I found that lots of the
large leaves looked chewed through, as well as new growth, and can only
assume it's slugs and snails. I didn't think that a large plant would
succumb as easily as the smaller ones do or be as palatable to the pests
- I don't know how I'm going to protect it either unless I resort to
pellets which I don't like using. Any ideas anyone?

I've had snails chew holes out of young emerging phormium leaves
while they're still relatively soft , foldedand small. Then as the leaf
lengthens and expands, so does the pattern of holes :-( I grow many
different phormiums but only purple kinds seem to be affected.. However,
this snail activity doesn't actually kill any leaves on my plants, they
just look unsightly. I've found that a small scatter of slug pellets
well down into the foliage sheaves solves it (not much chance of birds
or hedgehogs getting in there to consume the corpses).

It's not clear from your post whether your plant lost half its leaves
because some sheaves turned brown and died ? If so, that may indicate
some other problem in the plant, not connected to the snail-holes.


Janet

Hi Janet

No it's not dying from anything, it's just missing half its leaves due
to being chewed to bits! I think this happened fairly quickly, one day
it seemed fine and the next it wasn't - I have no idea why the snails
should choose to do this but I think I will use some pellets just on
this plant as I would hate to lose it. It's a tenax purpureum if that's
spelt correctly. I have another one, a dwarf bronze one with twisty
leaves that doesn't seem to have been attacked the same way but I might
put some preventative pellets on that too just in case.

Thanks
Lynda