30 JANUARY 1942, Page 14

In the ';arden It was an experience, corroborated by the

latest frosts, that wire guards proved as efficient a guard as glass cloches, and it is, of course, a mistake to imagine that glass as such has any very special virtue. Is there any place more mercilessly cold or severe on young plants than an unheated greenhouse? At the same time a very slight warming transforms it, as the new electric self-regulating thermostats have abundantly proved. It is a penalty that blackout regulations prevent the use of simple oil-lamps in such places. One ardent gardener, therefore, though in a southern county, wraps up even her macrocartn hedge in straw or dead fern leaves, and there is nothing better also straw or bracken for almost any sort of protective covering, whether of spring cabbage, frame-seedlings or tender shrubs and herbaceous

Postage on this issue : Inland and Overseas, id.