Garden Catalogues On the subject of gardens—the improvement of garden
catalogues is one of the features of this year. The Suttons and the Carters and " such great names as these " have always produced coloured books that make a pleasing form of literature even if we are not seeking a particular purchase. This year artistic and pleasing catalogues of all sorts of sizes have appeared. Both the new rose growers and the bulb growers of Wisbech and Spalding (where tulips and daffodils compose a new • and nourishing industry) are coloured with brilliant fidelity. Firms such as Hampton. decorate their catalogues with line drawings that might come from a standard 1)00k on botany, and the ingenious persons who have deve- loped the huge Devonshire estate (at the place where the Phoenicians used to land) have invented a catalogue wholly original both in form and illustration. It is not only in the naturalisation of Shetland sheep on Dartmoor that Dartington Hall is making fame as a pioneer. At the same time as the artistic catalogues have multiplied and improved the prices have fallen. Good seed (as it seemed to me) always was cheap. You got spacious value for your money ; but plants were often extremely dear. Today good rose bushes—to give one example—have come well within the reach of the humbler purse.
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