About this site

This site is written by one person, in one garden, about one pest. It exists because when box tree caterpillar arrived in mine, almost everything I could find online was either a nursery trying to sell me replacement plants or a page that had clearly never seen the problem.

Who writes this

I am not a horticulturist, an entomologist or a garden centre. I am a gardener in New Malden, Surrey, with a box hedge that I planted in 2018 and nearly lost in 2019. Everything on this site comes from managing that hedge and the plants around it through every season of infestation since 2019, plus the published guidance from the RHS and Butterfly Conservation where it is relevant.

Where something is my own experience, I say so. Where it is published research, I say that too. Where I do not know, I say that as well — there is more of that than most sites will admit.

Where the photographs come from

Every photograph on this site was taken in my garden in New Malden, in September 2026 — the bleached papery leaves, the webbing across the foliage, the damaged patch in an otherwise green hedge, and the bronzed growth on the feeding page. They are unedited apart from cropping.

There is deliberately no photograph of the caterpillar itself. The one that came with the original version of this site was not mine to use, so it has been removed, and I have not yet managed to photograph a live one. In its place the identification page carries a labelled drawing — which for working out what you are looking at is arguably more useful than a photo anyway, because it points at the features that matter. When I get a good photograph of a live caterpillar, it will go up here.

None of it is AI-generated, and that matters more here than on most sites. If you are holding your phone up to your own hedge trying to work out whether what you are seeing matches what is on the screen, a synthetic image is worse than no image at all. The illustrations are diagrams — clearly drawn, never photographic — so they can never be mistaken for evidence.

How this site makes money

Amazon affiliate links. If you buy something through a link here, I may earn a small commission and you pay exactly the same price. That is the only revenue this site has: no display advertising, no sponsored posts, no paid placements, and no brand has ever paid to appear here or been given copy approval.

I link to TOPBUXUS products constantly, which is worth being upfront about. It is not a relationship — it is that they are the company packaging Bacillus thuringiensis in domestic quantities for box in the UK. If a better option appears I will say so, and I have said plainly on this site which of their products I think are not worth buying. The full affiliate disclosure spells it out.

What I get wrong

This is a one-garden sample in one part of the country. Surrey is the worst affected region in the UK, with the warmest summers and the longest-established population, so my timings run early and my infestation pressure is at the extreme end. If you garden in Aberdeenshire your experience will be different and this site will be less useful to you.

I also cannot test everything. Where I have not used something myself I say so rather than writing a review of the packaging — see how we test.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, please tell me. Product listings in particular change without warning — the previous version of this site spent months pointing at a XenTari listing that had been delisted, which is exactly the sort of thing I would rather hear about from you than discover a season later. Email hello@boxcaterpillardisease.co.uk.