North American gardeners may be puzzled by their counterparts in Western Europe's vituperation of moles. What damage can these rarely-scene little fellas do to lawns and gardens? Europe's version is different, very different. The size of a small cat, it excavates an extensive series of tunnels in pursuit of worms and other prey. In doing so, the excavated earth is pushed up into a series of 'mole hills.' First recorded there in Elizabethan times, as lawns and grass tennis courts became popular they have been the despair of groundskeepers and amateur gardeners ever since.
What is despair for some though is profit for others--specifically mole
catchers. The advent of poisons has reduced their numbers but the waistcoats produced from the beasts' delicate fur were highly value--and equally highly priced.
How to discourage or even scare away moles is a frequent topic. Dubious claims have been made for plants such as
Euphorbia lathyris. Then there was Roald Dahl: solution: burying empty wine bottles with the necks exposed near mole hills. He claimed--apart from having a goodly supply of the required bottles--that the noise made by wind blowing across the open necks scared moles away. "This is not a joke. It early works, I have done it often," he wrote in
My Year. Dahl, for those unfamiliar with his work, was a noted story teller.
One can hardly blame this concerted campaign conducted against such an apparently innocent creature. Why, even Louis XIV, the famed 'Sun King' appointed a royal mole catcher to ride his Versailles Palace grounds of the unwanted invaders. Perhaps he was inspired by the example north across
la Manche, where his perennial opponent William III fr Britain was doomed by a regicidal mole. His horse stumbled on a mole hill, throwing William and breaking his collarbone. In a weakened state, he died shortly thereafter from pneumonia.
The British have largely forgotten this but over three hundred years later, there an official 'mole catcher to the king' at Versailles, presently one Jerome Dormion. He prefers the equally venerable 17
th-century traps rather than the more modern poisons or (gulp) empty wine bottles.
