DEMOCRACY STREET: The six year citrus plague

Ano Korakiana, Corfu - Albania and mother Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra

Our home in Birmingham - in the distance St Mary's Church tower amid the woods of Handsworth Park

Since 2006 we've travelled to-and-fro - πέρα δόθε - between out home in Handsworth Birmingham, where Lin and I have lived 45 years, and our home on Democracy Street in Ano Korakiana. Returning to the village after months away in England is a 'moment'. Will the power come on in the house? Will the taps flow? Will damp from rain have leaked down a wall? Will rats, mice or insects have been partying while we’re away? Has something died under, or worse, in a bed? It takes two days of errands - sweeping the curtilage, opening the door of the apothiki, hanging a tarp on hooks and bungees below the balcony against rain on the terrace, opening shutters; replacing a battery on the kitchen clock to set it ticking to local time; putting out balcony furniture stored indoors for winter; opening shutters; sweeping and vacuuming up dust; stocking shelves and fridge with the food bought on our first day’s big shop before dispensing with the hire car that Lin has driven up to the village; checking the tyres and charging the battery of my e-bike; making sure we have internet connection; greeting Vasiliki next door with embraces and kisses; being welcomed with words and smiles by neighbours, including Theodora and Pepe, her mum, in their bread shop. Then gardening and housework.

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After 12 years of living to-and-fro between Greece and England, Linda and I arrived in Corfu for Easter 2018 - six years ago. We discovered to growing dismay that our blood orange tree and two lemon trees were thoroughly infested with minute constellations of insects on the underside of their leaves, the leaves' upper surfaces covered in black mould. Scale insects had invaded and infested our citrus trees and were spreading through the whole island of Corfu. 'Sooty mould' had fixed itself, thriving in the wet of winter, over the surface of billions of leaves, preventing them absorbing light and breathing the carbon dioxide that produces glucose – photosynthesis vital to life.

Female scale insects on the underside of citrus leaves

Citrus trees were suffocating across the island. Mould had spread over their trunks and branches; over the ground and up the sides of the low walls of the terrace, blackening the plaka on gardens, terraces and verandas. Everywhere. Driving, we glimpsed, beside the roads amid healthy burgeoning greenery, orchards of blackened citrus trees, mould smirching their remaining fruit. Some people had repainted trees with whitewash, sawn off larger branches, leaving amputated trunks.

Sooty mould on a leaf's upper surface

What had happened? We asked questions of a local agronomists; researched the spread of citrus scale insects on the internet and spoke to other villagers. There was no memory of similar plagues, though the internet swiftly revealed the global ubiquity of citrus scale insect infestation, explaining how it worked, but not the provenance of these insects of the species Hemiptera, one of many sap feeders that, as well as scale insects, include aphid and whitefly. The male scale insect, short lived, can fly around spreading the infestation. In their thousands these insects stuck to the paper traps we hung in our trees.

Male scale insects trapped

The females, once clustered on the underside of leaves remain immobile, sucking sap from the leaves with hair-like probosces, excreting honeydew that spreads to the leaves’ upper surfaces. Sooty mould, present like dust in the surrounding air, fixes on the honeydew. Ants, clambering about the garden, milk the female citrus scale insects producing more honeydew and more mould. called Cladosporium and Alternaria - widespread airborne fungi whose spores thrive on damp year around, now fixed by the scale insects’ syrup, growing and spreading, strangling our citrus trees.

This was our last harvest of lemons, fruit already blackened by the sooty fungus. Oranges had fallen from their tree the previous winter. For years no blossom appeared and more or less all the other citrus trees on the island produced no fruit. We saw blackened skeleton trees everywhere - with now and then a survivor that must have held some unknown prophylactic, as well as promise. We asked around about what preventive measures had been taken. No answers. No pesticides were working.

White protective coat on dead scale insects

On advice we dissolved olive oil soap and cooking oil fixative and sprayed. This may, with our sticky paper traps, have slowed down the effects of the infestation. I wrapped sticky paper round tree trunks or painted duct tape wrapped round them with a very sticky tinned product from a garden shop. This stopped most ants getting into the foliage, though in their ant-like ways some died creating walkways with their bodies for their fellows to climb on up. Two lots of sticky bands one above the other on a trunk lessened the toxic symbiosis of ants and scale insects.

Preventing ants meeting scale insects

Scale insects are ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. These were hard. While feeding on cells just under the surface of leaves, as well as producing honeydew, they excrete waste to form a waxy covering that protects them from sprays – tho’ not entirely. Looking at leaves with a magnifying glass Lin reckoned this explained white rings around the insect clusters. Pressing down on these clusters, after spraying, we could smear them off the leaves. Were they dead? Was this the female scale insects’ immobility? The internet told us the insects’ protective cover remains on leaves for years. By the second year of this horrid plague our friendly agronomist at a nearby garden centre offered us two kinds of remedy – a diluted mixture to kill the female insects attached under the leaves; another dilute to inhibit their reproductive cycle. “Will this kill them?” I asked her “Yes” She said “But will they die screaming in agony?” I asked. “Yes assuredly” she said with a smile, noting my unscientific animosity to these pests that nature had turned on us via the lemon and orange bounty, which outside of a wealthy winter garden, we could never have enjoyed further north. Year after year we sprayed and sprayed at two week intervals. The insects died. More arrived and still no sign of blossom. Leaves that were not entirely blackened turned mottled yellow and dessicated.

I could no longer pop out our front door bump a tree with my shoulder and collect a lemon to squeeze on food, add to salad dressings, make citron pressé on sweltering days, mix myself, and guests, margaritas.

Tequila, lemon, triple sec, salted glass

Lin could no longer make her lemon ice creams - served cold and hard inside scraped out lemon halve. We could no longer enjoy watching the seasonal changes from blossom, to tiny but expanding green lemons to knobbly skinned yellow fruits hanging in fecund clusters amid the greenery, dropping now and then with gentle thuds to be collected for us and neighbours, and to take to England where, if green, they last for weeks gradually turning yellow in our kitchen. In November 2012 I’d put lemons, brought from Greece, with other small treasures of her childhood, in my mum's coffin in the Highlands. We served an orange dessert made by halving a juicy blood orange, adding cherry liqueur and serving the halves, heated in the microwave, with a chunk of walnut ice cream gradually melting into the liqueured orange; and Lin, after a neighbour's tutoring, made orange pie – portokalopita. There had, until 2018, been a ready supply of fresh orange easily squeezed. Now the orange tree suffered even more than the lemon trees. We watched its blackened branches becoming barer of leaves, atrophying into dead wood and parched twigs falling to the ground like dry bones.

One evening we discussed the plague with our naturalist friends the Swedish herpetologists Bo and Marie Stille, living in Kokkini below the Ropa valley. Bo reckoned there was little we humans could do; that we must wait for predators on the scale insects and for the trees to develop a natural resistance to these parasites. “Trees, like all living things, learn.”

Our friend Mark said that part of the problem was that lemons and oranges, though widespread, play no part - as once they did - in the island’s economy so there’s no research money, no prophylactic policies, no advice to people with citrus trees. So although we did continue spraying in hope, and as a means to torture these wicked vile depraved and evil insects. We also scoured the blackened surfaces of walls and plaka with an efficient bleach – Durochlor - bought from Ionic Chemicals a kilometre north of Tzavros, off the Paleokastritsa Road.

Then in the autumn of 2023 came a glimmer of hope. The scale insects were still fixing themselves to the underside of leaves but we began to see blossom – first on the lemon trees and a few on even the blighted orange tree. We rejoiced when that tree produced six oranges, but wondered if the tree, rather than making a recovery, was now enfeebled beyond hope by the years of infestation. We were told by Eleni, local agronomist at the garden shop on the main road near Tzolou – T-junction into the village – that predator pests had arrived, that the government had even introduced ‘nemetodes’. "So no more spraying" she advised "lest you kill the good insects."

In 2024 we arrive in Ano Korakiana the first week of April. Wonder of wonders – the lemon trees are fecund with fruit, green and yellow clusters, while the orange tree is covered, top to bottom in florets, with their lovely smell. In weeks that blossom had set amid burgeoning foliage full of hundreds and hundreds of little green oranges swelling by the day.