14 JANUARY 1949, Page 18

In the Garden

The habit of trussing both hay and straw has much increased of late. Such trusses are easily procurable and have surprising uses. They make, for example, excellent walls. I have recently seem them used to contain a compost heap till it sets itself and as the walls of a temporary pig-sty

. Snow and frost have not altogether arrested the season's precocity. Within a kw yards of one another were flowering, in the New Years a daphne, a primula, an iris Stylosa, a gorse bush and a prtinus, and the bulb spikes were "hailing for summer with their lifted spear. "

W. BEACH THOMAS.