I cut this tree down to about 4 feet every year; it's underneath my service line and I have therefore never seen any flowers but am content with the huge leaves. New leaves are appearing quickly now, and equally quickly they seem to get distroyed. After a day or two, between the veins, it turns a see-through yellow and within a day the outside starts to curl and the leaves turn crunchy and brown. Some beige coloured dust seems to be both on the upper and the underside of the leaves, barely visible, and sometimes I think there are tiny black flies there as well. Can anybody help with identifying the problem and give me advice on how to deal with it? As it stands right now I seem to get a new set of leaves every day and lose the ones from the previous day. Thank you very much.
Elsbeth--just a far out guess, but my taro was suffering similarly the other day. Have a close look at the underside of the affected leaves, see if there might be colonies of very tiny caterpillers, often clustered together. I think mine were tent caterpillers, very recently hatched out. They "skeletonized" the leaf just like you are describing. As I say, just one possibility to look for. Glen
