In the Garden Now that activities are in full swing
about the lawns, I have apppre- ciated once more the use of an old dessert-knife, discarded from the kitchen as being too worn. It can be sharpened up as one works with it, cutting out dandelions, weeding between grass edges and stone paving, trimming borders, &c., the carborundum coming out of one's hip-pocket every ten minutes or so.
After the recent disturbances of tiles from the roof during the gales of February, 1 have found it necessary to go over the lawns with close care, picking out fragments of tiling and even bits of glass that have been trodden into the grass, to :ie in ambush for the coming of the mower. a menace to its blades. The old knife is handy for this job, too. After this a day of rolling and then a rough cut, and the lawns already .begin to look like soft plush, nicely tailored for Easter. This attention has left little dark islands of uncut grass round the groups of bulbs, which at this moment are betwixt and between: the snowdrops and aconites finished, and the daffodils still in the spear-head stage. Some water-lily. tulips (Kaufmanniana) are already in bloom, but their foliage has been savaged badly by slugs this year, in spite of protection with soot and poisoned bran.
I have been doctoring a sick lilac tree, a ten-year-old double .white. which has been deteriorating for some years. I have dug round it and lifted it bodily, to find much of the root material rotted away: , After clearing all this dead stuff, 1 have washed the roots in a weak solution of (eyes' fluid, and reset the tree after digging out the sub-soil, and offering a bed of warm humus prepared from sand, compost, lime and bone-meal. The replacing of the surviving roots was the labour of a patient pair of hands. The damaged Irish yews, grossly barbered by the wires that formerly bound them, have been trimmed up and the wires re-laced by hop-twine. Their poodled appearance is now less remarkable, and I hope that after the wet winter they will make sufficient new wood to conceal the damage. Sprays of cherry brought into the house a week ago are already blossoming, and the faint almond smell helps me to banish the somewhat sordid odour of the D.N.C. spray with which I have been washing young Cox's Orange apple trees and black-currant bushes (against big bud). Amongst the vegetables, a promising row of spinach is already coming
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