Perched on an evergreen leaf in the gardens of Sandy Lodge is a creature better suited to appear on an Egyptian scroll. It looks like a composite beloved of the ancients, with the head of one animal and the body of another. The jutting, blunt-ended snout is frog-like, distinguished by a dark bandit stripe running back from the tip through the bulging eye. The lettuce-green smooth back is streaked with fluorescent orange markings. There is a hint of purple on the underside of almost closed insect-wing cases. One of the animal's hind legs bears shark's tooth projections along its length, like those on a grasshopper, but if this creature does rub its legs against its body, it makes silent stridulations.
The only sound on this unseasonably hot afternoon is the patter of tiny feet. There are little clicking noises all around as others of its kind are stirred to move, fluttering up then clattering down on to the leathery leaves of the rhododendron bush. Some sit together on one leaf in gossipy huddles of threes or fours. Others stay solo. Some shuffle to the edge of their leaf and crawl beneath. The little animal under my close inspection has perhaps had enough of the attention and launches itself into the air in a wavering flight.
Questions of scale and geography determine that the rhododendron leafhopper remains largely overlooked. It has only magnificence in miniature, for it can be no more than about 7mm long. Its presence here on the bushes bordering the lawns owes everything to a bringing together of two continents. The 18th-century naturalists who introduced Rhododendron ponticum from mountainous areas of the Himalayas never saw this leafhopper coming. It was only in the 20th century that the insect arrived, brought in by mistake with azaleas or rhododendrons from the New World, and it quickly developed a taste for the far east. Horticulturalists say the bugs lay their eggs in the buds, preventing them blooming in the spring. The insects I am watching appear to be simply resting, basking on the leaves in decorative innocence.