Destruction

I'm assuming that it was squirrels that smashed the main shoot and all the flowers off my calendula last night, after all these months... rather than, say, slugs eating through the stem or the caterpillar that defoliated a lot of the overwintered plants in my 'wildflower trough' before I found and eliminated it. (I wasn't too worried when that happened because there were only originally supposed to be annuals in there anyhow...)

After close inspection under a magnifying-glass -- demonstrating the tiny scale involved! -- it turned out that the little white curls where I sowed the mesembryanthemum seed were not, in fact, germinating roots but appear to be hatchling snails whose curled bodies are showing through their still-transparent shells :-p
One green seedling has emerged in that pot, but I'm not at all sure it's from that seed as opposed to just being a random other weed; the first thing to germinate in the Swan River daisy pot was definitely not one of those seeds. We shall see.