Mea Culpa
“Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Not bad for a Non-Conformist, eh? I read a lot.
So to what am I pleading guilty - apart from the need for Christ to come and die for me as well? Normally I am pretty good in the garden. I squish aphids, try to encourage beneficial insects and give errant snails quick air trips.
Now I, too, have read that your common or garden snail is actually a whiz at navigation and can make it’s way back to your prize dahlias from, scaled up, hundreds of miles away but (and here’s the cunning bit) very few snails can make it all the way back from across ‘that bourne from whom no traveler returns’ ie: the death! Our house is terraced, yes, but we’re at one end of the terrace, over the yard wall - going east, is a road.
Ok so it’s a side street and not that busy, but it’s busy enough for domestic mollusc control. *Fights with Spellcheck - It IS spelt MollusC, you dumb bit of (Americanised) software. I did Biology to “A” Level (yes, Noah had snails on the Ark - bother him); I should know.*
But to return to the Dahlias: this year I have allowed the garden to lie fallow. Haven’t felt up to doing more than the odd bit of dead-heading, watering and, a couple of weeks back, mollusc control. Thus what has flowered this year has been all the more precious, and when the magenta dahlia came up and flowered unaided and all under its own steam I was delighted. Then I discovered tiny snails were cutting their molluscoid teeth on it.
Ok, one or two baby snails go the same way as greenfly, if with more ‘crunch’! But there were loads of them. So I went out and sprinkled, very carefully, very sparingly, don’t want to poison the local moggies (though if it gets the one which insists on ‘going’ in my bath . . .), slug pellets - also effective against snails.
As I said, normally I wouldn’t bother but this year they’ve gotten a bit out of hand, & ansty, so something more drastic was called for. I offer the following for your consideration, Your Honour.
Remonstrance with the Snails
Ye little snails,
with slippery trails,
who noiselessly travel
along this gravel,
By silvery paths of slime unsightly,
I learn that you visit my pea-rows* nightly. *In this case read ‘dahlia’ though it doesn’t scan!
Felonious your visit, I guess!
And I give you this warning,
that, every morning,
I’ll strictly examine the pods;
And of one I hit on,
with slaver or spit on,
Your next meal will be with the gods.
I own you’re a very ancient race,
and Greece and Babylon were amid;
you have tenanted many a royal dome,
and dwelt in the oldest pyramid.
The source of the Nile! - O, you have been there;
In the Ark was your floodless bed.
On the moonless night of Marathon
you crawled o’er the mighty dead;
But still, though I reverence your ancestries,
I don’t see why you should nibble my peas.
The meadows are yours - the hedgerow and brook,
you may bathe in their dews at morn;
by the afed se you may sound your shells,
on the mountains erect your horn;
the fruits and their flowers are your rightful dowers,
then why - in the name of wonder -
should my six pea-rows be the only cause
to excite your nightly plunder!
I have never disturbed your slender shells;
you have hung round my aged walk,
and each might have sat, til he died in his fat,
beneath his own cabbage stalk;
But now you must fly from the soil of your sires,
and think of your poor little snails at home,
now orphans or emigrants all.
Utensils domestic and civil and social
I give you an evening to pack up;
but if the moon of this night does not rise on your flight
tomorrow I’ll hang each man Jack up.
You’ll think of my peas and your thievish tricks
with tears of slime, when you’re crossing the Styx.
Anon (and are we surprised?)
Ok, so I have no peas, I told you - this year I let the garden lie fallow - but the rest holds.
What I really want is a friendly, neighbourhood hedgehog. Though in a walled back yard this may be hard to come by. Otherwise I’ll settle for a pond with hungry frogs.
Oh yes, the card from S still hasn’t arrived - that ‘s TWENTY-TWO days now, it only takes four hours to travel here from Cardiff on the train!
One further confession - today I found a small snail on one of my plants, so I poked it to death with the backdoor key.
And FINALLY, after an hour, I get this posted looking like I want it!