In the Garden Startled by the superabundant promise of my
strawberry beds, I allowed a schoolboy curiosity to count the buds and blossoms on a single third-year plant. Mine is a new strain with the forbiddingly impersonal nomenclature of Cambridge No. 2, but a very healthy and riotously prolific cropper. It is very late, and produces a dark crimson berry with a rich flavour if hardly as delicate as that of Royal Sovereign. Nobody will believe me that my count reached 145. What was I to do ? Pick off 100 ? I left them and paid a visit to the Waterperry nursery- gardens in Oxfordshire. Lest I should have been tempted to the gardener's besetting sin of crowing on his own dunghill (for my straw- berries had been entirely compost-fed), I must say that there, at a time when strawberries were 5s. a pound, I saw- beds of Royal Sovereign producing berries of the size of a ,,baby's fist. They were growing in the open after the cloches had been removed, and a more superlative crop
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