My home's infested with giant willow aphids and they're as nasty as they sound

The sudden chiaroscuro leaves us in the dark, as if seated in a hushed theatre, while a section of the yard remains bathed in gold, perfectly backlit for drama.

Gnats and midges swarm the high-traffic zone just above the grass. Spiders sail through the crowd tethered to single strands of silk. Dragonflies and bees dive in and out of the fuss. Wrens and thornbills whip into frenzy. I half expect a whale to burst through the soil and gorge on the smorgasbord.

Life and death, in miniature, and on a grand scale.

We could never have enjoyed such a show had we not taken the plunge and had the seven spruce extending across the boundary into our own yard cut down.

The expensive and uncompromising (and rather fragrant) operation revealed an entire quarter-acre of us to the road. We lost privacy, shade and a valuable windbreak of at least 50 years in the making, but gained light, warmth and even glimpses of the ranges.

It's the kind of terraforming quid pro quo in which a custodian of established trees doesn't like to engage, but our pines, their backs and spirits broken by the relentless gales of this place, leant terribly and we'd begun to fear them, so they had to go.

Usually, the newly gifted parcel of sky is striped with the pastel contrails of diligent commuter jets joining the dots between busy cities but for weeks now it has been virtually empty (although still lousy with satellites at night).

This blank canvas of the pandemic brings to mind the evacuated skies after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Quick-thinking scientists used that extraordinary moment in aviation and modern history to study the impact an acute dearth of manmade cloud might have on weather patterns.

As I watch the birds and insects, I wonder if a similar study might not be under way right now, but my global concerns turn decidedly local when a sun shower breaks the moment.

Unfortunately, it's not rain, it's honeydew; sticky stuff from the bums of insects and the bane of my gardening existence.

About five years ago, such was the extent of a mysterious, tacky substance on our water tanks, I was sure we'd become the venue for some kind of convention for marsupial urine fetishists but the culprits proved to be more insidious than we could ever have imagined.

We are infested with giant willow aphids (Tuberolachnus salignus) and they're as nasty as they sound.

The creatures are thought to have hailed from Japan and made their way to Australasia in about 2013. Not only similar in appearance to H. R. Giger's monster of the Alien films - piercing proboscis, long, clutching limbs, ugly sclerotic bumps ... a shark fin - they rival the acid-blooded xenomorph (Internecivus raptus) for sheer evolutionary doggedness.

Firstly, no male has ever been found among their cloned colonies, immediately cementing their status as a superior species as they're blissfully free of inimical ego, aggression and sexual politics.

Clumped in high branches, they're also impossible to spray unless you have a cherry picker, a drone or a middle-aged death wish to revisit the arboreal days of your youth.

The aphids are often farmed by protective ants and will exude their honeydew (basically a never-ending reverse enema of high-pressure sap) that sticks to foliage which, cheerily enough, brings in millions of European wasps. Even worse, the saccharine secretion attracts sooty mould, meaning anything under the trees - grass, outdoor furniture (Bunnings regretus), the in-laws (Familial judgmentalus) - gets a subfusc makeover lasting well past winter solstice.

And, in their checkmate move, giant willow aphids, unlike most insects, actually hide during the fecund spring months to avoid predators, not that much seems to want to eat the horrible things anyway; a few species of ladybug larvae will have a go but our astute birds appear to have far more appetising meals to pursue.

All this means the only victory to be had over our minuscule nemeses would be pyrrhic, because we'd have to remove the trees but this isn't an option because we've already scalped the block to a confronting-enough level as it is.

Our willows were planted by someone else decades ago to sop up wet sections of the property and they perform this function to the detriment of many other species we've tried to smuggle into their vast and oppressive subterranean sphere of influence. And while willows themselves are a source of debate between Landcare traditionalists and natural sequence farming converts, we're not buying in either way. Simply, we're stuck with them and, it seems, their parasitic stowaways.

MORE BY B. R. DOHERTY:

Sometimes gardening seems like one, long covert war; you're constantly deposing one entity to install another. It's exhausting and part of me wants to just let it all grow over and see what happens - a bit like Cooch Windgrass (Kiwi gentlus) does in Footrot Flats, although a tree up the middle of the house is a little too granola for practical purposes.

It's estimated despite the fact humanity represents only one ten-thousandth of Earth's biomass (we don't even come close to bacteria or fungi), we've managed to see off most wild mammals and about half the planet's plant species. It's also thought the biomass of insects decreases by about 2.5 per cent each year.

Like the cleared skies of terror attacks and viruses, it's tantalising to consider what would happen if we suddenly just ceased to be and the planet was free to heal.

One of the many disease reads during iso has been Margaret Atwood's (Literas prolificus) MaddAddam trilogy. The series speculates precisely on the proposition of a planet flushed of profligate people and comes with a set of charming bioengineered humanoids built to inherit the joint in our absence. Standard features include UV-resistant skin, herbivorous digestive tracts and large genitals which turn blue when (emotion-free) sex is to occur.

Atwood's "Crakers" remind me of one misty night when our gobsmacked family stopped to watch two Leopard slugs (Limax maximus) mate while suspended from a tendril of snot on the front veranda. The sight of two giant blue penises emerging from the side of each hermaphrodite's head to eventually tangle into an orgiastic mirror ball of sperm-swapping synchronisation is still talked about with equal doses of intrigue and disgust.

Thankfully, I'd forgotten to buy Cornu aspersum bait that week.