More Books of the Week (Continued from page 669)
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• One cannot say that Adam and Evelyn, at Kew (Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 21s.) is made of the stuff of dreams, of history, of the movies, of erudite and unusual knowledge, or of the wanderings of a naive and imaginative under-gardener at Kew : it is made of all these things and many more besides. Mr. Robert Herring has woven a timeless fantasy out of the fiowerbeds, the old ladies who." decorate the seats" in their "bows of velvet and little ribbons under their "chins," and the meeting of -Adam with Eve, or Evelyn, as Adam called her, "for it's not in the nature of the Garden to let anything have a short name if there is a long one that will do." The book is elusive—perhaps too much. so—but this is a fault On the right side ; it is curious and clever ; it is also very elegantly written. Mr. Edward Bawden's bizarre decorations are most enter- taining.
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