Ruth Brooks is looking for snails. As we talk on this scorcher of an afternoon, she is rummaging under strawberry plants and searching among her spinach, with the munched leaves which give a telltale indication that snails have been here earlier.
But they've evaporated. And so, too, have our hopes of Ruth recreating for me, with the aid of a pot of nail polish, some of her quirky snail homing experiments which won her a talent search on BBC Radio 4 programme Material World.
"They don't like the heat," explains Ruth, as she peers beneath the leaves at my feet, beside the tea cup and flapjacks on the patio of her neat Totnes garden. "They don't like sliming over a hot surface, they will be making for the shade the whole time. and their instinct in this weather will be to curl up. That's typical, isn't it? The minute I want to show you some snails I can't find any, they've gone off somewhere."
Not to worry. For I can glean everything I might want to know about snails, and Ruth's evolving relationship with them, from her book A Slow Passion, which has just been published by Bloomsbury.
In this lovely book, with many a line drawing of snails slithering over the chapter headings, Ruth, a 72-year-old grandmother with a childlike sense of wonder about the natural world, shares how her exasperation with the snails which munched her lupins and delphiniums evolved into quirky idea for tracking their movements, and five months of scientific research followed by her favourite science programme on Radio 4.
"I'd tried everything to get rid of them," she says. "I put up barriers, put out Vaseline, egg shells, beer, and none of them seemed work. In fact it just made them bolder, and they seemed to regard it as some kind of adventure playground – they just seemed to enjoy it! They rode over the grit, they slithered up the Vaseline!"
This was the point at which many gardeners might reluctantly turn to the poisonous metaldehyde pellets, known euphemistically as "blue breakfast".
Ruth tried these, but only the once. "I couldn't bear it, the twisted bodies and the green slime, and the fact that they died in the throes of agony."
And simply squashing them also did not appeal. "Somehow, when I learned that snails have got a brain, I felt very squeamish about crushing them or hurting them," she says.
Ruth wondered if a better, more humane, solution would be to remove the snails from the garden in the dead of night. But just how far would she have to take them to be sure they wouldn't come back again? And, she further mused, if she picked them up, would they return to exactly the same place? She decided to find out by taking some of the snails from her flower bed in the centre of her garden, and putting them down ten metres away by her bottom fence.
"I sat down to watch them with a cup of tea and a book and nothing happened for ages," she recalls. "I had to go out that evening, and I thought how will I know if they are the same snails? I suddenly had this brainwave. I thought aha, nail polish! So I went upstairs and rooted about in a drawer and found this nail polish called Red Hot Desire. I went out in the garden and blobbed it on about ten snails. And after a couple of days they were back again, the ones with the nail polish on. They had found their favourite dosh again, the lupins and the delphiniums."
The BBC talent search So You Want To Be a Scientist? offered the chance to investigate her snail homing finding in more depth. With the last of her four children having just left home, and having just retired from her job of 35 years as a home tutor to vulnerable children, she found her dormant interest in science being reawakened. "By this time I was getting more and more curious about the snail itself, about what habitats it likes and how fast it can go, what food it likes – well I know what food it likes! – and I thought I'm just staggering about in the dark really, I've got so many questions, what I need is some science."
She was delighted when she found out she'd been shortlisted, one of four out of 1,300 entries. Her "prize" was to spend five months investigating whether snails homed – and how far – with the help of a mentor, ecologist Dr Dave Hodgson from the University of Plymouth. "It was wonderful," she says. "Not being a scientist, I had to learn the scientific method, get my head around simple statistics and learn to be methodical and careful, so it was a huge challenge really."
She conducted her snail experiments in her garden, with two samples of snails, taken from two different parts of the garden, each marked with a different nail polish.
"The idea was to see if the snails would go back where they were supposed to, and lo and behold most of them did go back to where they came from, not all of them, but enough to be significant. Dave was amazed because he was actually a bit sceptical about the whole thing," she says. "I repeated this experiment five times. One didn't work, because all the snails were eaten by predators, but the first two were quite astounding. Over a few days, a good proportion would be back in the right place."
A research student of Dr Hodgson's repeated the experiment at the University of Plymouth campus over a longer distance of 30 metres, and came up with the same result. And Material World producer Michelle Martin and presenter Pallab Ghosh made the journey to Devon to record the experiments for listeners, who also sent in "snail homing" reports.
Ruth recalls in her book how taking part in the research reawakened her childhood curiosity in snails and also her sense of fun, and not just on the occasion when she cleared a railway carriage after getting out her box of snails which she was taking to the Great Snail Racing Championships, held each year in Congham in Norfolk. "It was five months of sheer pleasure and fun," she says. "I'd get up in the morning with a spring in my step, I just loved it. I love playing, and for me this was a glorified form of play." The only people who lost out, she says, were her four grandchildren, because, thanks to the experiments and writing her book, she didn't have time to play with them.
Writing the book has been just as much of a thrill for Ruth as the science. She shared the experience in a talk at the Hay on Wye literary festival in June, where she also did some snail experiments, including one testing out her hunch that snails are attracted to magnetic north.
And in her garden, she's come to a bit of a truce with the snails. She collects them in a "terrarium", a big perspex box with a bowl of water and a snail lawn which, once the snails total 100, she releases, at a secret location at the dead of night, far enough beyond the homing distance to ensure that they don't return.
She's more relaxed, too, about how her garden looks. "I used to worry about it being very neat, but now I just stick things where they want to go. I have a wild bit at the end, plants that the birds and the insects like. I want to garden with nature now."
And are the snails still munching her spinach and strawberries?
"Yes, they are still munching them! But the strange thing is, my garden is much more productive than it used to be. This might be because I spend a lot of time hunting them out and putting them in the terrarium, but also – and this sounds wacky – it's almost as if there is an understanding between us now. They are saying 'right, you are being kind to us, so we will – occasionally – leave your plants alone'."
A Slow Passion, Snails, My Garden and Me, by Ruth Brooks is published by Bloomsbury, price £12.99.
