76 FLOWERS 



of ' small,' among them being individual cottagers 

 sending to market a single box of flowers. The con- 

 signments go by passenger train, and once or twice 

 in the season ' specials ' are run to facilitate the traffic. 



The figures here given refer to Spalding only ; but 

 in the 22 miles of country between Spalding and 

 Terrington, 2 miles west of Lynn, there is, on the 

 Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway, a group 

 of villages which practically exist on the cultivation of 

 flowers, combined with the production of fruit and 

 potatoes. These places, with their respective popula- 

 tions, are: Moulton (2,017), Holbeach (5,032), Fleet 

 (962), Gedney (1,925), Long Sutton (2,524), all situate 

 in Lincolnshire, and Walpole (1,767) and Terrington 

 (2,748) in Norfolk. In cut flowers alone, without 

 reckoning the large quantities of fruit and potatoes 

 handled, the traffic from this group of villages comes to 

 500 tons a year. Adding to this figure the 400 tons 

 a year sent away from Spalding, we get a total of 900 tons 

 of cut flowers a year now grown in just one section of 

 the Eastern counties, or 140 tons more than the whole 

 of the consignments from Scilly. 



Colchester sends 100 tons of roses and lilies in a 

 year to London and the North, the roses being grown in 

 the open and the lilies under glass. Isleham, a Cam- 

 bridgeshire village of 1,600 inhabitants, distributes 

 75 tons of cut flowers per annum in the same way; 

 Cowbit, a Lincolnshire village of 571 inhabitants, 

 does a trade in cut flowers to the extent of 26 tons a 

 year, and smaller quantities go from Mildenhall, 

 Suffolk (3,353); Magdalen Road, Norfolk; Dereham, 

 Norfolk (5,545); March, Cambridge (7,565); Guy- 

 hirne, Cambridge (1,116) ; Wymondham, Norfolk 

 (4,721); Ashwellthorpe, Norfolk ; Smeeth Road, Nor- 

 folk, and other places in the Eastern counties. 



