On 13/5/08 12:00, in article
,
" wrote:
snip

I remember going to a stately home, with large gardens, one September
and it was not until I had walked around the herbaceous borders for
about fifteen minutes thinking "there is something not quite right
here", when I realised what it was.

There was not a single spiders' web across any of the plants,
anywhere. Nor did there seem to be any insects.

I spent another ten minutes walking around before leaving, as it made
me feel so sad that some form of insecticide must have been used to
kill anything that moved on the flowers, and had either killed the
spiders directly or as a result of them having no food.

Some peoples' obsession with the 'tidy garden' ideal does seem to be
so destructive, despite the fact that many chemicals were made illegal
for horticultural use some years ago.

The OP should try and be happy that they still have garden spiders,
and brushing away webs each morning is a small price to pay.

It isn't necessarily an obsession with being tidy. Perhaps the OP has a
genuine fear of spiders. For some people this is crippling, irrational
though it seems to others. My husband can pick most up in his bare hands
while I can't bear to be in the same room as the large ones. We get masses
of those pin bodied ones, which bother me very little but on re-wiring our
house some years ago, the electrician who had been poking around under the
floorboards and who was terrified of spiders, too, told me he'd seen some so
big "they're breeding with lobsters down there". ;-))
OTOH, I do enjoy the dew spangled webs in autumn but I just don't want to
live with their inhabitants! In our house we have what is known to some of
us as "the spider shriek"!
--
Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children.'