ROME LETTER:These are curious times as the summer is cranking up slowly with a cool, wet start, writes PADDY AGNEW
THE little blighter is called Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, better known as the "red palm weevil" and you do not want him or her (especially her because she lays eggs all over the shop) to come visiting. The point about these highly anti-social little blighters is that they happily eat their way through palm trees.
Worse still, even as I write, the dreaded little beasties are happily consuming our mature Phoenix canariensisor Canary palm.
Palm trees, apparently, are not indigenous to Italy but were imported by various 18th and 19th century up-market bods keen to impress the neighbour. One of the most successful imports, it seems, is the Canary palm, of which we have (but perhaps not for long) a splendid specimen in our Trevignano garden.
Apart from an annual trim of the huge desiccated leaves on the lowest point of the trunk, our palm has had few requirements. One simply presumed it would stick to its time-honoured task of adding an elegant touch of exotic shade to the garden and continue to give no bother.
That is, until old Rhynchophorus("rinky" to his friends) ferrugineusgot on the job. These little sods reportedly fly in from north Africa (no doubt on a Ryanair special offer) and work their way inside your common or garden palm.
Once inside, they set to munching away unseen, having a whole series of midnight feasts and doing terminal damage. By the time the hapless gardener discovers the problem, it is nearly always too late.
All of this we learned when we summoned Maurizio, who runs one of the village nurseries and who occasionally is summoned to "pollard" the lime trees (at outrageous expense). The Baroness had had something of a rather mauvais quart d'heurewhen she strode out one recent morning to inspect the domain.
To her horror, she noticed that the palm tree had a very sickly look about it, a sort of sagging, been-up-too-late-last-night mien.
For once, yours truly did not get it in the ear since it is a well- known fact that Irish Timesforeign correspondents make for lousy gardeners and therefore little is expected on the horticultural front from your correspondent.
No, we had a heartrending moment of baronial mea culpa as the Baroness cursed herself for not having noticed the palm tree’s desperate plight rather sooner.
Almost nothing you could have done, said Maurizio. Our tree is just one of tens of thousands up and down the Italian peninsula currently being devoured by Rinky and his sisters.
In response to the stricken lamentations of the Baroness, Maurizio promised that he would make one last stab at saving it. Given that our palm is in a private garden and not a public place, he was able to douse it with some sort of vicious chemical concoction intended to stop the little blighters.
However, even as he did this, he held out little hope that the patient would recover from this particular illness. At time of writing, the prognosis is not good.
To add fiscal insult to moral injury, we will now probably have to pay another vicious bill to have the “infected” palm tree cut down, chopped into pieces and removed.
Under the terms of a 2007 Italian law, if you have a dead or dying palm on your property, then you are (in theory) obliged to report the matter and have it removed to a special dumping ground where it can contaminate no more. No question, it seems, of chopping it up and using it for winter fires (mind you, I am not too sure how well a palm tree would burn).
The times, as Alice would say, truly are “curiouser and curiouser”.
Not only has our beloved palm tree been attacked but we are also experiencing a very, very slow, wet and cool start to the summer. The other day, geologist Pio Bersani claimed that the Tiber had touched levels last seen in Rome in 1956.
If somehow you had missed the rain (and that would have been difficult), a walk along our lake beach would soon put you in the picture. The lake’s level has risen so much that our beaches have been more than halved in depth.
Mind you, given that the lake functions as a fall-back reservoir for Rome, this is not all bad news in view of what will, apparently, be a very hot summer – when it comes.