The banana slug: Don't think of it as an invader intent on shredding your garden but as a useful decomposer. For some, it is a sacred cow.

THE NORTHWEST, in recent years, has come to fancy itself at the center of the gardening universe. Heroes in our own minds, we're sure the gardening torch has passed from England to our little corner of America. Sure, we have great nurseries, and a plant-nurturing climate. But we really distinguish ourselves (or not) by our hordes of garden experts, in evidence at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show, where opinions were being flaunted about as thickly as a new coat of mulch.

So here's a little horticultural quiz. If you score big, you, too, can mouth off mangled plant names and proffer suspect advice. (Answers at the end.)

True or False?

1. You can increase the size and number of tomatoes by blowing on the flowers for a couple of seconds at mid-day during the first month after blooming begins.

2. Bigger and juicier berries are as easy as laying down some matching mulch. Red plastic used as mulch for strawberries results in 10 to 20 percent bigger fruits.

3. You can tell how hardy a rosemary plant is by how deeply blue the flowers - the darker the blue the more tender the plant.

4. Our native banana slugs can grow to 10 inches long and weigh a quarter-pound. And they can eat several times their body weight each day.

5. When you turn on your bug-zapper to keep the insects away while dining outside on the deck, those little machines fling contaminated bacteria from the bodies of zapped houseflies up to 6 feet through the air. Bon appÀetit.

6. The entire body surface of a slug produces mucus that the creature uses for self-defense, moisture control and mating.

7. We think we're hip with our quest for dusky flowers, but Alexander Dumas started the craze in 1850 with a novel called "The Black Tulip," about murder, greed and dastardly deeds. However, no leaf or flower can be truly black - that is, absolutely devoid of any hues or overtones of other colors - unless it is dead.

8. A slug can produce mucus thick enough to seal shut the mouths of snakes or shrews.

9. English genetic engineers are working on making Christmas trees that light up all by themselves, using genes from other organisms that contain glowing chemicals.

10. The great gray garden slug earns its name with a penis nearly half its total body length.

11. To keep cut flowers strong and erect, add a few drops of the anti-impotence drug Viagra to the vase water. The aging of both people and plants results in less availability of cyclic GMP, which among other things, keeps living tissue from becoming flaccid. Viagra slows the breakdown of cyclic GMP, thus promoting rigidity.

12. Slugs produce mucus so strong that they can hang from it in midair to copulate, which they do, at the ends of stretchy mucus strings more than a foot long.

13. Human urine to repel deer must be correctly applied - spot treatment isn't effective. Spray at the beginning of the growing season with a mixture of four parts water and one part fresh urine.

14. Truffles are simply a kind of mushroom that grows underground, although in the past it was believed they were an evil soil formation, or a product of deer semen.

15. All slugs come equipped with both male and female sex organs, so they can, and do, mate with themselves if no other slugs are around.

Valerie Easton finds fun in her work as a horticultural librarian who writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine. Her e-mail address is vjeaston@aol.com