Hello, I'm new to the forums so hopefully I do everything correctly!

I've had a very confusing issue with two of my white bird of paradise plants lately. A bit of background, these two are planted about 5 feet apart with an orange bird of paradise between them and had been growing well for a few years with no issues.

However just these past two days the two have been absolutely ravaged by something, and I'm hoping you all can help me identify what exactly is the culprit. The plants have had their stems chewed through right below the leaves, causing the damaged branches to fall over, and there is a great deal of shredding on the stems as well. Oddly enough the leaves are largely completely undamaged, only the stems were affected. Another oddity is that the orange bird of paradise in the middle is completely untouched.

Initially I thought my dog was the culprit, but that didn't make a whole lot of sense as the plants were ignored by him for years and the plant is also apparently toxic to dogs. There was one isolated incident that occurred to one of the two plants a few months back where similar damage occurred to one branch, but nothing else happened and it recovered nicely until these past two days, where both plants were damaged to the point I'm not sure they can recover. I've attached photos in hopes of getting an explanation because I'm completely at a loss as to what could have done this.

I'll post the photos I took once I figure out how to get the site to accept them.

This post was edited by nhhwang on Tue, Jun 24, 14 at 18:04