Garden view “I can’t help but pick up hitch-hikers,” says Katrina Roche of her slippery stowaways
Taking garden refuse to the tip always leaves a few backseat stowaways, says Katrina Roche. And they love to surprise the driver!
Have you had snails in this car?’ came a tentative voice from the rear passenger seat. I’d been rumbled! The answer to this enquiry was indeed yes, molluscs have frequently hitched a lift in my little car. What my passenger had noticed was a tell-tale snail trail on the car’s ceiling fabric, which my cursory inspection had failed to detect before the journey.
It’s not only snails – slugs are regular passengers too. It’s an occupational hazard of running my one-woman seasonal maintenance service; wildlife tends to escape the refuse sacks I fill when tidying clients’ gardens. They usually make their bid for freedom after dark, when I’m too late to take the bags straight to the local tip and they remain in the car overnight.
These seemingly slowmoving creatures can transport themselves into all sorts of car nooks and crannies during the hours of darkness. When I arrive at the tip the following morning I try to ensure that all the escapees join the lawn clippings, prunings and leaf litter in the garden refuse skip, ready to make their contribution to the composting process. Yet no matter how thorough my search, these interlopers always seem to evade my attempts to round them up.
A few weeks ago I had a rather unpleasant surprise when, on one of my trips to the wholesale nursery, I reached out to adjust the car radio and found my thumb and forefinger gripping not the volume dial but a similarly sized snail that had adhered itself to the dashboard.
This invasion by fauna is not confined to gastropods. I’ve happily shared my car with a smallish spider for the past three years. It has devised a shelter between the steering column and the windscreen wiper lever, from which it makes superfast raids to catch its prey.
Now I come to think about it, I’ve shared my cars with a number of spiders, though they usually set up camp beside the wing mirror, where their intricate webs defy wind, rain and motorway traffic to demonstrate that spider silk is, says Wikipedia, five times as strong as the same weight of steel.
The most numerous of these uninvited car sharers were the dozens of box tree caterpillars that escaped from the denuded remains of some clients’ box hedging last summer. These lime-green-and-black-striped larvae remain perfectly camouflaged on the plant, but they’re easy to spot once they emerge onto car seat upholstery and boot linings. The gentleman at the local car valeting service was somewhat bemused when I settled up with him, informing me that he had found several caterpillars when he vacuumed my car.
Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before I progress from creepy crawlies to amphibians, given the frequency with which I seem to unearth toads from borders and find frogs hiding in the undergrowth.
My little Citroen C1 is fast becoming a biodiversity hotspot, sheltering waifs and strays from local gardens. I’m relatively relaxed about this because, more often than not, I’m the only person in the car. However, I have resolved from now on to make a same-day delivery to the recycling centre with the detritus from my garden tidying, rather than providing bed and breakfast accommodation for a selection of invertebrates. So, hopefully next time I offer someone a lift in my car, the only signs that it is owned by a gardener should be a few stray leaves and the scent of autumn-trimmed lavender. ✿
My Citroen C1 is fast becoming a biodiversity hotspot, sheltering waifs and strays