We all love our Texas Mountain Laurels! Beautiful evergreen shrubs or trees, nearly invulnerable, with fragrant purple “grape Kool-Aid” pendulant cascading flowers in spring! But alas, their Achilles’ heel is afoot (pun intended). The voracious Genista moth caterpillars can strip them of their new growth in short order, vastly reducing the number of flowers you will get in Spring. Tonight, by flashlight, I removed 50 or so from one of my plants. Personally, I pluck them off and toss them a good distance away to serve as a food source for all the little hatchlings and fledglings that my foraging adult birds are producing right now. But quicker and easier is to simply blast them off with a high power nozzle and they will likely get eaten by predators before they make it back up into the tree. You can locate them by the chewed area near the tips of new growth, accompanied by silky spiderweb looking stuff. For more garden tips, my native plant gallery and more, feel free to check out the rest of my website, martinbyhower.com.