Cornucopia

inspired by Jude's Thread Keepers, this elephant shaped puzzle piece is now my Thread Keeper, the handmade black&white thread was a gift from Jude 

Ever since having read Elisabeth Tova Bailey's 'The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating' I have become even more fond of snails and, much to everyone's amazement & oftentimes horror, slugs too.

I cannot quite recall how I came across this book back in 2014*, but I must have fallen in love with the title and therefore was curious as to its contents. I also heard of a remarkable discovery, I seem to remember this was on the radio, made by a woman wanting to get rid of snails in her garden, in a nature-friendly way. She collected them in a shoe box, moved them into the park across the road, only to find them back in her garden the next day. Or so she thought, she couldn't be sure, so she gave each snail a different dash of nailpolish on their shells, collected and moved them yet again. Lo and behold a day later the same snails were back in her garden. She kept moving them further and further away, they kept returning. Proving snails have a sense of direction and are way smarter than we reckon.

Having then decided I liked snails and slugs I did not do any more research into their lives. Enjoying their presence in the garden, where they are seen to be copulating in plain sight, balancing on swaying stalks or even devouring each others dead bodies. I have been known to applaud their nibbling on my art. Sometimes they are content to leave their tiny bite marks in trails on the plain paper, other times they only feast on my ink markings. 

Today I learned a great deal more in this article: what you never knew about slugs! U.K. Country Living July 2025; the highlights:

"Slugs are a gardener's best friend: they turn organic waste into compost, devour pests and even clear up dog poo. Only less than a quarter (in the UK) eat lettuces and seedlings. You can deter them in a manner of nature friendly ways. (....)

Slug romance is a long and remarkable proces. They are hermaphrodites, which means they have both male and female reproductive organs, but still need to find a mate to reproduce. Many species mate by entwining together in a tight corkscrew, while hanging precariously from a tree or overhanging wall on a long, sticky strand of slug mucus. Like trapeze artists, they'll dangle mid-air, exchange sperm and both become pregnant. (...)

The collective noun for a gathering of slugs is a cornucopia. It's rather fitting that these garden-friendly creatures are named after the mythical horn of plenty, a symbol of food, abundance and nourishment."

Aaahh, if that's not romantic I don't know what is....imagine us humans, men and women getting pregnant, bet the world would be a different place. Also, what does it say about us that we choose plants that don't belong here and are disappointed when they don't thrive or survive without us killing off what does?

 

booklet i made in April of this year: dogs I would like to date

in the image below you can see the snail bites compared to the one above

*I almost always write my name, where and when I bought the book on one of the first pages; this book is within easy reach in my studio being one of my favourites, as is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, I mention it here because that too is apparently a snail-favourite: the spine has been almost completely chewn away