How to defeat the enemy peacefully

Slugs are particularly fine connoisseurs when it comes to plants. They will spot the newest and rarest of one’s plant collection and if they could speak to us, would comment on how…tasty it all is. Mature Delphiniums vaporise overnight, especially the coveted ‘Sandpiper’. It is simply caviar to them. But like a guest leaving a vintage red wine stain on your carpet after a party to remind you of the expense, slugs will leave you a slimy stem and, if you are lucky, a few midribs. Not succulent enough, they’ve moved on to the imperial dahlia.
Despite all this, I begrudge putting pellets down. It’s like land mines; it also harms untargeted benign things. No, I much prefer to put beer baths for them to drown in (although that means disposing of swollen bodies on a regular basis), but admittedly not everyone is alcoholic and some prefer to binge on food rather than booze. Farewell giant lilies then. Sometimes I feel I might as well put a special label saying ‘rare and precious, enjoy the feast’. My last resort is nematodes, which apparently parasite the body of slugs with bacterium, slowly driving them to their grave, but it’s pretty costly and has to be reapplied every 6 weeks. Clearly I’ll have to re-mortgage the house if I want a slug-free garden.
Perhaps the thing to do instead is to grow plants that molluscs don’t like. Oriental poppy should be the perfect candidate, having hairy leaves that slugs surely won’t touch. That’s two weeks of the year covered with flowers then…and bare earth for the rest of the year. For poppies’ leaves have the bad habit of dying down completely after the plant has flowered, leaving a great gash in the borders at the worse time of year - the height of summer. One cannot really plant annuals in their place either. A few years ago, I thought I was clever planting white cosmos around my ‘Perry's White’ poppy. Easily raised in a pot whilst the crepe flowers of the poppy were out dancing, popped in a couple of weeks later, they grew beautifully supplying the border with the same fluttering white feeling. I felt so proud, surely even Gertrude Jekyll couldn’t have done better! Well, I was put right in my place before long. The wretched poppy resumed its growth when the cosmos was at its best in late summer. Or tried to do so, completely shaded by the annual. I couldn’t put myself to dig what was the finest clump of cosmos I had ever grown and so the poppy gave up the ghost.
And that was a dramatic event for me because, despite all their foliar faults, oriental poppies are amongst my most favourite of all flowers. It’s the way they make the light dance and reflect on their petals that do it. If one were to believe in fairies, one would imagine their wings made of the same material. And for the colourphile in me, the fact that they come in just the most glorified shades in the vegetable world is not a negligible thing at all. The straight orange one needs revisiting, and admittedly is not for the faint hearted. I have a bold(er) friend who has mixed it with the apricot ‘Prinzessin Victoria Louise’, lots of blue flax, cerise Astrantia and tons of greenery (later perennials such as Phlox and Monarda) in her border and it looked ravishing. I shall have a picture of it imprinted in my mind forever. It really was bliss.
‘Watermelon’ (photo, below) is another daunting one to place with particularly vibrant pink petals, whilst ‘Royal Chocolate Distinction’ is dusky purple/brown and dramatic. Ugly but essential, if only for the name. There is also another one I adore called ‘Karine’. Its flowers are smallish, but of a sweet blush-pink colour and they open wide, like those of a Flanders poppy. Perhaps equally reminiscent of the Flanders poppy, but this time because of the colour is the excellent ‘King Kong’ with large red frilly flowers on strong stems – no less is expect from Mr. Gorilla!
I didn’t replant ‘Perry's White' but put in its cousin Romneya coulteri instead and it delights me as much, perhaps even more, having not only white crepe paper petals, but also a nice bright yellow boss of stamens in the centre and lovely semi-evergreen blue foliage to boot.
It is a temperamental plant to accommodate though (the climate of England is not very similar to that of its native California!) and mine is not yet the thug it can become where it is happy. I have admired it at its best in Hyde Park and also at at Sissinghurst where it was so happy it grew out of cracks in an old wall. Perhaps it is better behaved on chalk.
We'll soon find out.