In the Garden Several critics of the garden have been
lamenting English conservatism in the potager or vegetable garden. The charge has a general truth, but a very large proportion of the vegetables that have more or less disappeared from our plots have been rejected for pretty good reasons. One of the best of all vegetables on the table is the Mange-Tout pea, but my experience of it is that the plant takes up so much room in the garden in proportion to the yield of pods that it can only be usefully grown in the bigger gardens. Cooks dislike both those admirable roots, scorzonera and salsify, known as the vegetable oyster. The little custard marrow is very much the best sort of gourd, but it is harder to grow and less prolific in many soils. Almost the best of all vegetables, to my taste, is well-bleached chicoty, such as one especially associates with Belgium, and it should be much more widely grown; but the art needs study. Of all the rarer green vege- tables, purslane, which is nowhere to be procured, seems to me, as I have urged before, to be more worthy of introduction, and a good many more salad plants might be grown, includ- ing bleached dandelion. A board on its edge at either side of the row and another flat over the top, do the bleaching perfectly, as you may see in many a humble French garden. It may interest vegetable gardeners to know that experiments now being carried through at Wye College suggest that asparagus may be grown much more easily and cheaply than
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