Is everything in your garden lovely? Well, lucky old you.

This summer - okay, what's been passing for summer in the UK - my own garden has been a victim of the Great Mollusc Invasion.

Out there in the damp greenery, even as I write, there lurks a heaving mass of plump-bodied slugs and snails.

There are times when I could swear everything, including the lawn, is moving.

They are dining on my hostas and gorging on my petunias. Some have been climbing up my kitchen window, while others have been clinging to the back door frame.

They have defied all attempts at mollusc control - the pellets, the salt, the beer in an old jam jar.

Mother, who loves all creatures regardless of size, shape and natural sleaziness, wonders why I can't just live and let live.

She disapproves of all my methods of disposal and even thinks it's cruel to drown them in best bitter.

"Well, we could always smother them in garlic butter and eat them," I suggested. "Yummy-yummy."

"Disgusting," said Mother, who is definitely more of a winkle woman.

"What do you want me to do then?" I asked. "Wait till it gets dark and nobody's about, then pick them up and throw them into our neighbour's garden?"

"Don't you dare!" she said. "That is extremely antisocial."

Today, however, I know that things in my garden could be worse ... much worse. At the weekend my brother phoned and told me he'd found an intruder on his land.

It was dusk, he said, when he heard a noise. Shining his torch into the gloom, a beam of light picked out a creature roughly the size of a small dog, digging as if it had been offered a productivity bonus.

Startled by the glare it quickly ran off into the darkness and disappeared.

Was it a dog? A large cat? A mole? I asked.

No, he said, it was an armadillo.

Yes, that's right, an armadillo, as in: "a burrowing mammal of Central and South America with a covering of strong, horny plates over most of its body."

I should, perhaps, point out that my brother lives in Alabama, a state in the heart of North America's "Deep South".

"What will you do if it comes back?" I asked. "Keep it as a pet? Give it to a zoo?"

He told me he would shoot it.

"That's awful," I said. "In the UK, armadillos are regarded as an exotic species. If I found one in my garden it would be all over the front page of The Argus."

My brother wasn't impressed, not even slightly. "They're pests," he said. "One armadillo can do more damage to your lawn in a night than an army of moles."

"So, what else do you get in your garden?" I asked.

My brother told me about wild turkeys, racoons, possums, rattlesnakes and the occasional deer. Then he mentioned friends, living a few miles north of his house, who had found a black bear rooting in their garbage, and others who had spotted an alligator eyeing up their swimming pool.

That, of course, put my life in the UK's mollusc ridden "Deep South" into perspective. But something still puzzled me.

"Okay," I said. "After you've shot this armadillo. What do you do then? Bury it?"

"No," he said. "I wait until it gets dark and there's no one about ... then I pick it up and throw it into a neighbour's garden."