Help - Unidentified beetle eating my lavender!

[Blu]

I am an inexperienced bumbler-about-in-the-garden, and planted a nice little row of lavender plants.

They are now covered in some very smart little beetles, which I think are eating them.

The beetles are about the size of a ladybird, and very shiny dark green/black - or sort of shiny black with a dark green incandescant effect.

Shall I exterminate them, and if so, how?

i had some like this last year, mine were sort of copper coloured. i asked rhs advice and they said it must be co-incidence no lavender pest was beetly and they might have hatched there, hence so many. i've seen a few again this year in same area but not actually on lavender (which wsa fine)

These are a new pest that has set up shop here from the Med. They are called Rosemary Beetles, assuming they look like this .

We had a rosemary bush killed off by them before I realised what was going on, but they like lavender too. Just picking them off by hand and treading on them is v. effective at reducing numbers, but you do need to keep doing it very regularly, or bribe children to do it for you. They like to hide in the bits where branches join, so can be quite difficult to spot, but very satisfying to squash.

ooh mine wreen't like that! they were more like pretty vine weevils.

Oh we have these in our garden. DD spotted them last night, there I was thinking how pretty they are, didn't realise they will kill of my beautiful new lavender bushes. . Best get rid of them then.

That's the one.
Makes sense too - I uprooted a huge old spreading rosemary bush and planted the lavender in it's place.

Right - picking and squashinng, tomorrow!

Thank you, Frogs.

Enjoy, Blu! We told the children these are 'naughty beetles' to get round the 'don't want to squash pretty beetles' thing, and the name has stuck. And killing off my lavender is pretty naughty, whichever way you cut it.

It is pretty likely to be rosemary beetle. We get them on the lavender bushes, but fortunately they and the rosemary seem to survive the onslaught.

Ours don't really look much like the picture - they are much less shiny, and have a sort of stripiness to their 'shell' which is a kind of greeny black colour, with an opalescent sheen.