356 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS, 



My experience of a small garden leads me to give first 

 place to salads. A yard square of rich soil, well managed, 

 will yield a handsome and delicious weekly dish of salad 

 nearly all the year round; and, at the same rate, seven or 

 eight square yards will supply a daily dish including let- 

 tuces, endives, radishes, spring onions, mustard, and vari- 

 ous kinds of cress, and fancy salads, all in a state of fresh- 

 ness otherwise unattainable by the Londoner. My only 

 difficulty has arisen from irregularity of supply. From the 

 small area allowed for salads, I have been over-supplied in 

 July, August, and September, and reduced to in-door or 

 frame-grown mustard and cress during the winter. With 

 the equable insular climate obtainable under the canvas, 

 this difficulty will be greatly diminished; and besides this, 

 most of the salads are improved by partial shade, lettuces 

 and endives more blanched and delicate than when exposed 

 to scorching sun, radishes less fibrous, mustard, cress, etc., 

 milder in flavor and more succulent. 



The multitude of savory kitchen herbs that are so sadly 

 neglected in English cookery (especially in the food of the 

 town artisan and clerk), all, with scarcely an exception, 

 demand an equable climate and protection from our de- 

 structive spring frosts. These occupy very little space, 

 less even than salads, and are wanted in such small quanti- 

 ties at a time, and so frequently, that the hard-worked 

 housewife commonly neglects them altogether, rather than 

 fetch them from the greengrocer's in their exorbitantly 

 small pennyworths. If she could step into the back yard, 

 and gather her parsley, sage, thyme, winter savory, mint, 

 marjoram, bay leaf, rosemary, etc., the dinner would be- 

 come far more savory, and the demand for the alcoholic 

 substitutes for relishing food proportionably diminished. 



My strongest anticipations, however, lie in the direction 

 of common fruits apples, pears, cherries, plums of all 

 kinds, peaches, nectarines, gooseberries, currants, raspber- 

 ries, strawberries, etc. 



The most luxuriant growth of cherries, currants, goose- 

 berries, and raspberries I have ever seen in any part of the 

 world that I have visited, is where they might be least ex- 

 pected, viz., Norway; not the South of Norway merely, but 



