Neo4j and Ruby: How can I speed up unit testing?

Am starting to write unit tests along the lines of http://ift.tt/1azwyej

One of the approaches there is really slow (10 seconds per test) and the other doesn't delete labels (and probably other things)

Can anyone suggest a more elaborate approach? I noticed that in the core neo4j material, the java documentation describes methods that create and tear down temporary databases, but I don't see a way to access those from the (very nice) ruby and rails neo4j gems. Perhaps via the low-level REST api? It's hard to figure out what api calls are available.