Garden Shows It is a pretty and growing custom, and
a useful one, for the shires to throw open the best gardens on particular dates ; and one of these—at St. Paul's Walden on May 28th—will be the garden cultivated with much affection by the Queen's mother. She was a real gardener, practising what Kipling taught:
Such gardens are not made By saying Oh how beautiful • And sitting in the shade.
Wherever she dwelt she gardened, in the hard sense, up to the last. One of the most vivid of my garden recollections is a Paul's Carmine Pillar over the porch of St. Paul's Walden, and this bright briar-rose was, I believe, invented, so to say, within the county. Incidentally Kent is the county— and certainly it well deserves the compliment—usually called "The Garden of England " ; but the phrase was first applied (by Fuller) to Hertfordshire. Kipling applies it more widely: " Our England is a gar.den."
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