In the Garden
The roses are now coming into their kingdom, with crown and sceptre and bands of music. Except for a dozen new bushes, replacements of casualties, my rose-beds are peopled by plants put down on Alamein Day in 1942. Their labels have long since disappeared, but nameless they still smell as sweet. This year no green- or black-fly, and no eel spot or scab, have come to spoil their beauty. The iris garden. too, is in full display, and once again I long for more space to be able to develop this aspect of my delight. I have brought back, from the Master's garden of a Cambridge college, as a gift from his reneroui wife, a load of tubers, yellow, white, delicate pink. Something will base to be sacrificed if they are to be given ample room. The vegetable garden, too, is beginning to take that lush and blowsY look which brings confidence to the gourmet. We are about to cat the young broad beans, slicing them up, pod and all. They need, of coune, to be cooked in butter and eaten with slices of York ham. But that is/ counsel of perfection, foreign to life in the sterling area.
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