26 MARCH 1948, Page 14

The Warm West

A letter from the North of England begins thus: "I came back to find the lizards basking on the rocks in the sun and doing nothing but blinking red eyes and thinking it was June ; and it has been more or less June weather ever since." It is, of course, a mistake to suppose that the South is always warmer than the North. A truer distinction perhaps is between the East and West. The East of England is usually sunnier and colder. On the farm from which the above passage was written scarcely a sheep suffered from the grim spring of '47; by the farm- house grow large bushes of fuchsia, which would have been reduced to an herbaceous habit in most Southerly and Midland districts. So I have enjoyed tea under a bush of lemon verbena on the West Coast and failed to grow the bush at all in the Home Counties.