In My Garden
The opulence of which I wrote above has been most apparent in the flower and vegetable gardens. I have never seen lawns looking so lustrous. This spring I gave mine a copious dressing of basic slag, and in June attacked the daisies and dandelions with one of these new weed- killers through a fine spray. Since then the showers have done the rest: though a well-adjusted mower, that does not bruise the grass, has helped. What a good return the gardener has from a little attention to his tools. And this is what so many neglect ; even enthusiastic gardeners. They put away their hoes, spades and forks clogged with wet soil, and leave the mower chocked with grass-cuttings. The result is rust and bluntness. A cup of oil and paraffin in the shed, an oil-can for the mower, and, above all, a rough file to keep the edges of hoes and spades keen: these are provision for much lighter labour next time, and a longer life for the tools—and probably the user.
Figs and grapes, grown on a south and a west wall of the house, on a terrace above the frost-line, promise abundance this year. The fig has been yielding some half-dozen fleshy fruits a day since the middle of August. The grapes dre still green ; but one, the Royal Muscadine, Is so laden that it looks like a sentimental advertisement for health salts or a tonic wine. I hope for some vintage there, though last year 1 put the juice into a cider cask that was too acid. The result was two gallons of wine vinegar ; valuable, but perhaps redundant in that quantity. Every year there is one or other triumph which I vow I shall never forget ; and, of course, I find the recollection blotted out by the following year's speciality. This summer it has 'been the roses. Were they ever so handsome, so free from green-fly, so perfect in bud, and so abundant ? But even as I write this, I am being summoned out to inspect a sudden appearance of black-spot, dropping leaves and an ominous shrivelling. But that is a gardener's life ; an exquisite, almost a guilty uncertainty,
even in his most exultant moments. RICHARD CHURCH.
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