I looked at a weeping aspx willow, and the knotted trunk and crown looked as if they might strangle aspx anyone foolish enough to stumble into their reach in the middle of the night. We turned a corner, and saw a sign saying: "Heavy Stone Ornaments can aspx become unstable. "I don't like anything bigger than a spinach leaf, though I'm all right with house-plants. I could jump on top of a huge cheeseplant, and it wouldn't bother me at all."You'd think her phobia would be a terrible handicap when it came to horticulture, but no, aspx Melanie has a very GuestBook nice garden. It was in aspx Ireland, and the soil GuestBook was very fertile, so the leaves were particularly large, GuestBook you see.""Is it just rhubarb that disturbs you?" I asked."No," she said. Maybe I should buy a couple of plants for that difficult back GuestBook border.""It's the leaves," GuestBook she said, edging away.

"If you started whacking me around the head with one, I'd be hysterical. I've been like this ever since I fell into some plants when I was a child. We were wandering around our local garden centre admiring the flourishing collection of flowering cherries, and then all of a sudden she came to a standstill in front of a rhubarb plant."I'm not too keen on rhubarb," she said, with a slightly tense note in her voice."I love rhubarb," I said "Rhubarb crumble, rhubarb fool... And then I started worrying that the dead slugs would poison the local hedgehog and birds - quite apart from the fact that (a) they looked more horrible dead than alive and (b) I couldn't actually bring myself to pick their carcasses up and remove them to some other, more convenient location.Anyway, my problems with slugs are as nothing compared to the difficulties that my friend Melanie faces every day in her garden; for she has a horror - a full-blown phobia, in fact - of large leaves I never knew this until last Sunday afternoon.

A garden pest, on the other hand, seems to have some rights; who am I to destroy the natural ecological order that exists beyond my four walls? We did try slug pellets last year, but the carnage was too horrible: a gastropods' Gallipoli. If a rampant household pest had eaten most of our furniture, I would of course be frothing at the mouth with rage, and calling in a masked squad of bug control men. The slugs ignored the boring creepers and a few dull, dwarfish conifers, but no doubt they'll consume anything vaguely attractive that I plant this year; so now I'm at a loss about what to do with the sad, half-empty bed that should really be the centrepoint of the garden.Still, I'm not about to start complaining: which is another sign of the therapeutic qualities of gardening. To be honest, the slugs had already decimated it last summer: I had envisaged a veritable cloud of frothy lupins and exotically scented lilies, but the baby seedlings were eaten right up before they'd reached an inch high. When we moved to our new house a couple of years ago, I was worried that the garden was too small, but in fact I never seem to have enough time to make it quite right.