Rose: holes eaten in leaves

What it is likely to be on rose

1. Leaf-cutter bee

   Candidate 1common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Leaf-cutter bees

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Neat semicircular or oval pieces cut cleanly from the edge of a leaf, most often on roses, wisteria and lilac. Solitary bees remove them to line their nest cells. The cuts are so regular that they are unmistakable once seen — no chewing insect leaves an edge that smooth — and the damage is cosmetic: a plant can lose a good many leaf margins without any measurable effect on its growth.

   Points towards it

   • · the bee cuts and leaves within seconds and is almost never caught at it
   • · the bees are nesting outdoors nearby
   • · one female works a few leaves on one part of the bush

   Argues against it

   • · this damage comes with no insect on the plant and no trail

   Check this next

   Look at the EDGE of the cut. Leaf-cutter bees remove neat semicircles or ovals from the leaf margin with an edge as clean as scissors — no chewing insect leaves a smooth curve, because chewing produces a ragged one. The holes are always at the margin and never in the middle of the leaf.

   What to do now

   Nothing at all. The plant is not meaningfully harmed, the cutting stops within a week or two when the bee has finished provisioning, and these are declining solitary pollinators — this is the single most common reason a rose in flower gets sprayed for no reason. Remove the cut leaves if they bother you.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Leaf-cutter bees — control

   Checked 2026-08-13

2. Capsid bug

   Candidate 2common 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 rose — 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 Rose profile lists the problems it is prone to.