In praise of the earthworm A gardener’s best friend
When I was a four-year-old boy growing up in England, I became fascinated with earthworms. I delighted in digging them up in our garden and carefully stuffing hundreds of them into my trouser pockets. That probably meant dismantling them to find out how they worked. Sadly, they never work quite so well after that, poor things.
On one occasion, my mother decided to wash my trousers, squeezing the excess water out of them through the rollers of the old mangle before hanging them out to dry. Unfortunately my mother hadn’t checked my trouser pockets, which were full of worms. You can imagine the rest.
Humble but vital
Charles Darwin once said: ‘It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have
