GARDENERS have been at war with slugs since the dawn of time (or, rather, the dawn of gardening). They munch our prize plants and offer little mitigation to make such crimes forgivable, lacking beauty, grace or other charming attributes. The best we can do is to remind ourselves that some other delightful (and declining) animals, such as hedgehogs and thrushes, might come along and eat them.
Slugs may be unprepossessing, but they have a noble heritage. The phylum Mollusca is mostly marine and includes an array of bivalves and snails, the brainy octopuses and their kin, plus the nudibranchs or sea slugs in their myriad colourful and strangely shaped forms. Slugs don't form a clear-cut taxonomic group and are best described as 'land-dwelling gastropods with no shell or a greatly reduced shell'. Other features include two pairs of sensory tentacles, the smooth mantle behind the head, which bears a large breathing pore or pneumostome, and the tubercles, which form ridges on the body.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 15, 2024 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 15, 2024 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Save our family farms
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A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
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Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
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On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
