208 THE POSSIBILITIES 



another on the steep crags facing the harbour 

 of St. Peter ; and with them a whole generation 

 of practical gardeners has grown up. Every 

 farmer is more or less of a gardener, and he gives 

 free scope to his inventive powers for devising 

 some cheap type of greenhouses. Some of them 

 have almost no front and back walls the glass 

 roofs coming low down and the two or three feet 

 of glass in front simply reaching the ground ; in 

 some houses the lower sheet of glass was simply 

 plunged into a wooden trough standing on the 

 ground and filled with sand. Many houses have 

 only two or three planks, laid horizontally, in- 

 stead of the usual stone wall, in the front of the 

 greenhouse. 



The large houses of one big company are built 

 close to each other, and have no partitions 

 between. But this system cannot be recom- 

 mended. Altogether, when I revisited Guernsey 

 in 1903, I saw that the system of greenhouses 

 which prevailed was that of long two-roofed 

 glass " tents," placed by the side of each other, 

 but separated from each other by partitions 

 preventing the circulation of the air over the 

 whole blbck. As to the extensive cool green- 

 houses on the Grande Maison estate, which are 

 built by a company and are rented to gardeners 

 for so much the 100 feet, they are simply made 

 of thin deal board and glass. They are on the 



