How often it happens in England that retiring statesmen come
back to .Candides immortal dictum : it fact- culticer noire jardin. I think I never met anyone who was quite so ready with the Latin- syllables of any plant, rare or common; as Mr. Gerald Balfour in the days of his retirement. In the latest issue of his little green quarterly, The Countryman, Mr.
Robertson Scott devotes the first article to a precise account of his "cottage" garden, by Sir Austen Chamberlain. One of my most vivid recollections in affairs of the garden is a quarter of an hour spent with that really great gardener in a little glass house containing rock garden rarities. His zest was such that the gardener said to me afterwards—entirely by way of commendation—that he would have been quite afraid to leave the gentleman there unwatched ! The • delightful article in The Countryman is on a wider gardening theme, and is compact of good hints to gardeners of any and every sort, especially in the association and succession of plants.
He is, it may be inferred, especially proud of two mixtures, the purple primula cashmeriana coming out of a mass of anemone apennina and the unrehearsed association of a dark alstroe-
meria (always in any variety most useful and invincible of plants) and a St. John's wort.
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