IGHT one assume that the buyer of lot 820 in Woolley & Wallis’s ‘Parker & Morris: The Art of Decorating’ auction last month was not a dedicated gardener? Surely, even the greenest-fingered would baulk at paying £2,394 for 17 snail shells. However, it was not fingers, but the shells that were emerald green, originally having been inhabited by Manus Tree Snails, which are found only on one of the Admiralty Islands off Papua New Guinea, where they are known as ‘forest jewels’. They are as beautiful as, presumably, they are fragile, and came from the eclectic collections amassed in their various homes
