RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CI, Issue 30004, 13 December 1962, Page 28

RANDOM REMINDER

NATURE NOTE

The roses, the gardeners are saying, have been good this year. So, we say; have the slugs. And we’re not referring in any way to the difficulty of rousing our family in the morning. We have not before seen quite so many slugs about, quite so many slime trails, sparkling in the morning sun, so much evidence of a night spent in reckless dissipation. We know a woman who has been most upset at discovering, day after day, the damaged leaves and plants left after a gargantuan feasting by the creatures of the night. Her husband also became alarmed when

he found his lettuces had scalloped edges. So he asked, when he met his friends one afternoon, what he should do. They waited for him to shout, and they told him. Salt, they said, was the thing—not ordinary salt, but the sort used by butchers in making brine. So he bought a considerable quantity of the stuff and erected a wall around the lettuces. A sort of brine curtain. The Chinese could not have been more satisfied with their handiwork after they had knocked up that little affair of theirs, and when he was done, he examined his defences with all the care of the military commander of East Berlin.

He sat inside, thinking of the carnage. And about 11 p.m., he could wait no longer. He went out to inspect. The wall had gone, and it was clear what had happened. All about were slugs and snails in the abandoned attitudes of early morning at some Roman revels. Then the horrified householder saw one enormous snail, with a shell the size of a meringue, which had not quite succumbed to the general gastronomic torpor. It took a piece of lettuce leaf, wiped it over with the remains of the salt, and slowly began munching. So there you have the first and, we trust, the last shaggy snail story.