Hydrangea: holes eaten in leaves

What it is likely to be on hydrangea

1. Vine weevil

   Candidate 1common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Vine weevil

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Two quite different kinds of damage from one insect. The adults cut characteristic notches from leaf margins, which is unsightly and rarely serious; the grubs eat the roots underground, which kills the plant without any warning above ground until it collapses. Container plants are far more affected than open ground.

   Points towards it

   • · adult vine weevils cut clean semicircular notches from the leaf EDGE, never holes in the middle
   • · the adults feed anywhere they can reach on a container plant

   Argues against it

   • · holes through the middle of the leaf are caterpillars or slugs. Vine weevil damage is always at the margin — this rules it out entirely.
   • · slime points to slugs, which chew irregularly rather than in neat notches

   Check this next

   Look at the shape of the damage. Vine weevil notches are neat semicircles cut inwards from the edge, as though done with a hole punch. The adults are harmless to the plant's health — it is the grubs in the compost eating the roots that kill it, so a notched leaf is a warning rather than the problem.

   What to do now

   Treat the notches as a signal to check the roots. Tip a container plant out and look for creamy white C-shaped grubs in the compost; those are what kill the plant, and a wilting fuchsia with notched leaves has usually already lost its root system.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Vine weevil — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

2. Slugs and snails

   Candidate 2common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Slugs and snails

   Checked 2026-08-13

   The most destructive garden pest in a wet British spring, and the one surrounded by the most confidently repeated advice that does not work. They shred seedlings overnight and leave irregular holes with slime trails nearby.

   Points towards it

   • · a dried slime trail is conclusive
   • · damage starts on the lowest leaves, nearest the ground

   Argues against it

   • · neat marginal notches are vine weevil, which leaves no slime

   Check this next

   Go out after dark with a torch. Slugs feed at night and shelter under pots and leaf litter by day, so an inspection at noon reliably finds the damage and never the animal — which is why the cause is so often guessed at rather than confirmed.

   What to do now

   Clear the leaf litter and pot bases they shelter under during the day, and check after dark. Removing the daytime shelter within a metre of the plant does more than anything applied to the leaves.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Slugs and snails — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

3. Capsid bug

   Candidate 3common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Capsid bugs
   • Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board — AHDB: Capsid bugs on ornamentals

   Checked 2026-08-13

   A fast-moving green or brown bug, 6mm long, which feeds on shoot tips and is almost never seen doing it. What it leaves is unmistakable once the sequence is understood: it kills small patches of tissue in a leaf still folded in the bud, and as the leaf expands those patches tear into ragged holes with brown edges, so the finished leaf looks chewed and distorted while the plant never had a caterpillar on it.

   Points towards it

   • · the feeding happens in the bud, so only leaves that were unfurling at the time are marked — the older leaves below are clean
   • · the holes have brown papery rims and irregular torn edges, because they are expanded dead patches rather than bites
   • · finding nothing is genuine evidence here — the insect leaves before the damage shows, and every competing explanation leaves something to find

   Argues against it

   • · damage confined to mature leaves cannot be capsid, which can only mark a leaf that has not yet expanded — this rules it out entirely.
   • · a visible chewer or a slime trail is a simpler explanation for a hole

   Check this next

   Look at the edge of one hole with a hand lens. A capsid hole has a dry brown rim and a torn outline because the leaf grew apart around dead tissue; anything eaten has a clean green edge where the tissue was cut.

   What to do now

   Leave it alone on an established plant, or pinch out the worst shoot tips. The insects have almost always gone by the time the damage is noticed, so treatment lands on damage that has already finished, and the growth behind the ruined tips is unaffected.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Capsid bugs — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

Narrow it down

This page lists everything at once, which is the right shape for reading and the wrong shape for deciding. The interactive tool asks one question at a time, starting with whichever would separate these causes fastest, and stops as soon as further answers would not help.

Opens with the plant and the symptom already set. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere — the answers live in the address bar and nowhere else.

What this does not cover

These are the causes GrowingHQ holds rules for on hydrangea — not every cause there is. Where several problems look alike, the honest answer is often that they cannot be told apart by eye, and a page that named one would be guessing. If none of the above fits, the general holes eaten in leaves page lists causes across all plants, and the Hydrangea profile lists the problems it is prone to.