Slither Again

 This is a summer activity.

Most evenings - especially damp ones with a light mizzle of rain - I step outside to see what the molluscs are up to. I must look like a crazy woman: torch in hand, stepping so carefully, peering into every corner.

It’s strange to realise that I’ve gone from being a person revolted by slugs and snails to someone who’s maybe just a little bit obsessed with them.

The obsession began a few summers ago and has only grown since.

Last year, I started marking some garden snails with dots of correction fluid. Then I felt bad about it - was I interfering, harming them somehow? But this year, I’ve found quite a few of my marked snails still going strong, and still inhabiting the same corners of the garden as before.

This one has decided tansy is not to its taste.

In the dark, I have to be so careful where I tread - there’s nothing more awful than accidentally crushing the shell of a garden snail. If that happens - and it rarely does, because I watch my step -the snail faces a prolonged and painful death. It’s kinder, then, to end things quickly and stamp out its life. Maybe I’m a little bit (a lot?) mad, because doing that to a snail makes me really sad. Even though they devoured all my cosmos seedlings and have done great harm to my Vancouver lupins*.

Young garden snail. At this stage, its shell is very delicate. My 'dangerous' size sixes are only for comparison. 

*I’ve had the Vancouver lupins (Lupinus polyphyllus ) ever since I visited Eamon in his home city in 2013. I collected the original seeds in the grounds of the University of British Columbia.

This is what my Vancouver lupins were like six years ago.

And this is what they are like now.